http://lawandletters.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-you-shouldnt-go-to-law-school.html
[Note:
this is part of a series, which also includes Some
Loosely Connected Musings on Passion, Regret, Law School, and Class Privilege,
with Advice to Prospective Law Students, and Making
the Transition from the Law to Grad School, the latter of which lists other
posts, possibly to be added in the future.)
In my
very first post on this blog, I promised more detail about why the jobs
that one might expect after law school aren't anything to look forward to. I'm
fulfilling that promise here, and moreover offering some more reasons why you,
yes you, dear undergraduate reader who is applying to law school, should
decline to go there. Most of my examples come from litigation, because that's
what I know, but I'll bet one could come up with an equally good set from
transactional work too. My aim here is to come up with the definitive
anti-practice-of-law essay, one to which I and others can point bright-eyed
undergraduates to for some time to come.
What follows is a loosely divided list of things that you might not know about
the practice of law, and which should give you pause before you invest three
years of your life and countless thousands of dollars in tuition and
opportunity costs to go to law school. Law school really has little value other
than to prepare you for a legal career of some sort. If you want to go into
business or consulting, an MBA is quicker and provides more useful skills
("Thinking like a lawyer" is a bug, not a feature.), and, while
lawyers do enter other careers (prominently writing for some reason) there's no
reason to believe anything they got in law school put them there. With no
further ado:
The Jobs Suck
There are three basic types of job that one can get out of law school. (I
exclude here legal academia, which is a great job, but one which is reportedly
nearly impossible to get unless you've either law review + super clerkship at a
top 3 school, or phd plus some combination of above, etc.) They are as follows:
1. Corporate Serf. You will work for a big firm. You will make a lot of
money. But you will have no time to spend it. You'll work sixteen hour days,
and in the beginning of your career, those sixteen hour days will be spent
doing things like rooting through warehouses of documents looking for
privileges to avoid disclosing things in discovery. Needless to say, this work
is incredibly boring. Or you could be doing piles of research on minutiae of
securities law in preparation for a bloody negotiation. You'll have neverending
pressure to bill more and more hours, and much of your work will be morally
dubious at best, actually wicked at worst. (Consider, for example, how many
lawyers must have been involved in the efforts to bury all the incriminating
tobacco company documents.)
This is the job that everyone wants. But you don't know what you're trying for.
Don't believe me. Believe the
data (Zaring & Henderson, "Young Lawyers in Trouble" (2007)):
In this review essay, we compare Kermit Roosevelt's and
Nick Laird's bleak portrayals with findings from a unique dataset on law firm
profitability, prestige, hours worked, and various measures of several
associate satisfactions. We also mine the findings of several empirical studies
that track the experience of lawyers over time. We observe that higher firm
profitability is associated with higher salaries, bonuses, and prestige. Yet,
higher profits also have a statistically significant relationship with longer
hours, a less family-friendly workplace, less interesting work, less opportunity
to work with partners, less associate training, less communication regarding
partnership, and a higher reported likelihood of leaving the firm within the
next two years. Nonetheless, graduates from the nation's most elite law schools
tend to gravitate toward the most profitable and prestigious (and most
grueling) law firms. The attraction of the most elite firms may be superior
outplacement options. Or perhaps, as both novels intimate, it may stem from a
reluctance to make hard life choices.
2. Underpaid Do-Gooder. You'll work for a public interest outfit. You'll
make a pittance -- you might still have roommates (especially if you want to
live in a major city). You'd better hope your law school has a good loan
forgiveness program. For all that, the work is more interesting. You get to
fight for causes in which you believe -- most of the time. But you'll have
moral ambiguities here too. Even an ACLU lawyer is sometimes asked to take up
causes and clients about which (s)he's not sure. And the work won't be that
much more interesting. Because litigation is still litigation, and contains an
outrageous amount of discovery. But now you're in an organization that can't
afford paralegals. Who does the dirty work? Who reviews the 12 bankers' boxes
of internal procedures from the government agency you're suing for sex
discrimination? Yep. You. The low lawyer on the totem pole. At least you'll get
to show up in court occasionally.
3. The Sucker. This is the club for those who don't go to a top ten law
school. You get the boring work and the moral difficulty of the corporate serf,
with the terrible salary of the do-gooder, because you're working in some small
firm doing family law, or criminal law, or wills and trusts, or real estate. I
can't put it any better than did Cameron Stracher in
the Wall Street Journal:
The legal profession is really two professions: the elite lawyers and everyone
else. Most of the former start out at big law firms. Many of the latter never
find gainful legal employment. Instead, they work at jobs that might be
characterized as "quasi-legal": paralegals, clerks, administrators,
doing work for which they probably never needed a J.D.
Although hard data about the nature of these jobs are difficult to come by (and
rely on self-reporting, which is inherently unreliable), the mean salary for
graduates of top 10 law schools is $135,000 while it is $60,000 for "tier
three" schools. It's certainly possible that tier-three graduates tend to
gravitate toward lower-paying public-interest and government jobs, but this
lower salary may also reflect the nonlegal nature of many of these jobs and the
fact that these graduates are settling for anything that will pay the bills.
At $38,000 a year for law school, plus living expenses, law-school graduates
certainly have a lot of debt ($60,000 on average, upon graduation). For this
price, college students and their parents should be thinking harder about their
choices. When I went to law school, nearly everyone tried to convince me that
doing so would "keep my options open." All this really means is:
"You can still be a lawyer."
* * *
It's time those of us inside the profession did a better job of telling others
outside the profession that most of us don't earn $160,000 a year, that we
can't afford expensive suits, flashy cars, sexy apartments. We don't lunch with
rock stars or produce movies
The point being that these job options suck. There are boring, immoral jobs
that pay better (investment banking). There are moral, low-paying jobs that are
more interesting (investigative journalist). There are boring, low-paying (or
high-paying!) jobs that are less immoral (foundation fundraiser). Why take the
worst of all possible worlds?
Lawyers are Unhappy
Everyone knows some happy lawyers. I know a handful of lawyers who are
genuinely happy with their work and their careers. But those are special cases,
and special people in special situations. The data over the entire population
of lawyers are much more grim. Notre
Dame's magazine summarizes some of the studies:
Lawyers suffer from depression, anxiety, hostility, paranoia, social alienation
and isolation, obsessive-compulsiveness, and interpersonal sensitivity at
alarming rates. For example, researchers affiliated with Johns Hopkins
University found statistically significant elevations of major depressive
disorder (AMDD@) in only three of 104 occupations: lawyers, pre-kindergarten
and special education teachers, and secretaries. Lawyers topped the list,
suffering from MDD at a rate 3.6 times higher than nonlawyers who shared their
key socio-demographic traits.
Lawyers also suffer from alcoholism and use illegal drugs at rates far higher
than nonlawyers. One group of researchers found that the rate of alcoholism
among lawyers is double the rate of alcoholism among adults generally, while
another group of researchers estimated that 26 percent of lawyers had used
cocaine at least once -- twice the rate of the general population. One out of
three lawyers suffers from clinical depression, alcoholism or drug abuse. Not
surprisingly, a preliminary study indicates that lawyers commit suicide and
think about committing suicide more often than nonlawyers.
The divorce rate among lawyers appears to be higher than the divorce rate among
other professionals. Felicia Baker LeClere of Notre Dame's Center for the Study
of Contemporary Society compared the incidence of divorce among lawyers to the
incidence of divorce among doctors, using data from the 1990 census. LeClere
found that the percentage of lawyers who are divorced is higher than the
percentage of doctors who are divorced and that the difference is particularly
pronounced among women.
Why do you think you can defy the data? You probably can't.
You'll be Surrounded by Jerks
The lawyers-as-jerks stereotype is one that has more than a grain of truth to
it, in my experience. In about four and a half years of actively practicing
law, I came across numerous examples of utterly atrocious behavior, often in
litigation. It's not always big things -- though big things are the ones that
hit the news -- but patterns of obstreperous behavior and downright stupidity
that can wear you down over a day-to-day basis. Bickering over stupid document
production requests, delays, phantom schedule conflicts... all these things add
up. Contemporary lawyering is often an expensive form of childish game-playing
with the rules of civil procedure. It's psychological warfare for minute
tactical advantage.
Then there are the lawyers in your own firm, who have been embittered by years
of this crap and by long hours. And then there are the clients, who are paying
an outrageous amount of money (if you're at a firm), or have been badly screwed
and are consequently distrustful and hostile toward the entire world (if you're
at a public interest group). Not surprisingly, both groups of people act like
jerks too.
And it's not just a matter of the pressures of the law turning people into
jerks. I think we can easily believe that jerks select themselves into the
practice of law. Autoadmit. 'nuff said. (Also, consider the sheer number of
college debaters and similar hyper-aggressive sorts that end up in law school.)
Have I mentioned the debt?
And not just the debt. But also the massive opportunity cost of three years of
your life. Compare this to grad school, where top phd programs tend to be
funded. Or to an MBA program which is a year shorter (and sometimes two years
shorter). Or to working at something that you might find interesting, where you
can learn, build human capital, and get paid, all at once.
Stracher again: "Rather than keeping options open, the crushing debt of
law school often slams doors shut, pushing law students to find the
highest-paying job they can and forever deferring dreams of anything
else."
The law will make you into the worst kind of person.
If you believe that one's personality is shaped by one's life experiences, then
you should be very worried about what the practice of law will do to you. I
suggest that you should fear the inculcation of the following highly negative
personality traits:
Unintellectualism. Contrary to popular belief, the law is not a
particularly "intellectual" profession. Most of the reasoning in
legal argument is patently casuistic. Legal arguments are often made in a
"kitchen sink" fashion, throwing every conceivably plausible argument
into a brief, regardless of the relative strength of the arguments or coherence
of the submission as a whole. The practice of law is the development of a habit
of extreme intellectual dishonesty where the routine is to state one's
opponent's arguments as uncharitably as possible in aid of weakening their
impact and conceal every possible fact or principle that is against one's
interest which one isn't explicitly required to disclose.
Arrogance. A lawyer is surrounded largely by non-lawyers who come to
him/her for expert advice. That alone can encourage some arrogance, but even
more is necessary for the psychological warfare between lawyers. Lawyers often
try to use extreme false confidence (a.k.a. arrogance) to intimidate one
another into tactical concessions, e.g. by making the other lawyer think that
they've screwed up, that "things are always done this way," etc. That
is a tactic especially used by older lawyers against younger ones. The younger
ones need to develop their own armor of arrogance to resist it.
Pettiness. As I've been emphasizing, much of the nastiness in the
practice of law is in small-minded disputes about nothing points of procedure
and other maneuvering for tactical advantage. Do you really want to practice
being the kind of prick who demands that pleadings be thrown out for being one
day late?
Uninterestingness. The practice of law takes so much of one's time that
one can engage in few activities with the rest of one's life. It is also so
stressful that one tends to obsess about it. The result is that lawyers can
become very boring people, with nothing to talk about except their ugly jobs.
Impatience. See above with respect to stress. Also, the law is a very
deadline-driven occupation, especially in litigation. There's always more work
to do than there is time to do it in, and there's always a court and opposing
counsel breathing down your throat with respect to strict deadlines. If you
miss a deadline, the consequences can be terrible: a lost case, a malpractice
claim against you, etc. Don't be surprised when this spills over and you find
yourself swearing at people who walk too slowly while crossing the street.
Aggressiveness. Again, the psychological warfare between lawyers rewards
this.
What to do instead?
Something you love. Something that makes you happy. Something that you value
for more than money or status or perceived glamour. I wholeheartedly endorse
Paul Graham's brilliant essay, How
to Do What You Love. Read it. I also recommend my
previous post on this topic.
As I said, there are some people who are happy with the practice of law. But
the data are not in your favor. Make this decision very carefully. Don't just
drift into it because you're not sure what else to do with a humanities degree.
So you think that law school is the right choice for you? Good.
Now let's make sure that your reasons are solid and weatherproof: The first
year of law school is not for fair-weather enthusiasts. There will be plenty of
opportunities for you to feel overwhelmed and thoroughly drenched in
self-doubt. With an increasingly competitive job market, even 1Ls (first-year
law students) aren't immune from the pressure of the placement process. And at
many schools there is often the "case method" of teaching that could
be another strain.