From the Classroom to the Firm

-- By AmandaHungerford - 11 Feb 2008

Introduction

Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students are employed by a law firm, while only 4.3% work in public interest. But why such dramatic flocking to the firms? The pay is better, but the hours are worse, the work is more tedious, and it could be years before young associates see the inside of a courtroom.

One thing driving the masses to Big Law is three years of acculturation. From the first day of law school students are assimilated into firm culture. Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations that “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in terms both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” (350) So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture.

What follows is a functional analysis of law school. For simplicity’s sake I have broken the study into two discrete categories (actions and beliefs), although I realize in practice these categories often have overlapping effects.

Actions

Law school is adept at shaping the way students act. Those actions will become habits that students continue once they reach Big Law.

The Curve

The curve is one of the first mechanisms to influence new students’ thoughts and behavior. Through it, students are effectively told they will no longer be measured by merely their own merits, but also by the merits of others. In subtle ways the curve thus affects students’ interactions with others. Suddenly, helping fellow students becomes much less attractive, because by doing so you may decrease your own odds of success.

• I am extremely interested in this argument. It is almost certainly wrong to conclude that the normalizing of grades has the slightest effect on the real costs and benefits of collaboration, for reasons one could give pretty simply (though some of the details are more complex than they look). But to the extent that students believe this argument, it has an absolutely awful social effect whether it is true or false. I would be very eager to hear from people on the subject of the incentive effects of the grading curve.

The you-against-others mode of behavior will become a large part of firm culture, too. With only a few partner positions available, associates have an incentive to look out for themselves. This mentality will also play a role in associates’ legal practice, since lawyers are judged not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’.

• I think this is unestablished, and in my experience quite wrong. As an employer of lawyers can say it bears no relationship to how I promote. It's not the culture of any law firm I can think of, and it certainly doesn't represent the nature of in-house or small-partnership practice. Nor does it seem to me how government agencies promote lawyers. Is there a sector left in which it might be true. Sure. But I can't quite make myself believe it, and certainly not without some evidence.

Sacrificing Relationships

ILs quickly find that law school’s pace is frenetic, and the work all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Given that law schools must have a (notoriously undemanding) third year, the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By then, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the norm.

Few people would willingly sign up for a lifetime of work, so the sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it’ll just be like this until IL is over; then, until law school is over; then, until I make partner. Young lawyers become ingrained in choosing work over relationships before they realize what is happening.

• Maybe. But wouldn't it be truthful to say that pretty much no matter how lawyers work, they are either selling hours or foregoing autonomy or both? If the first, the economic incentive is to work long hours in order to maximize the value of one's skills. If the second, isn't the criticism of law firms that they are really the third, leveraging the hours while determining the client, and that the party trading autonomy for time should be an in-house lawyer, which is pretty much what the firms do make it possible to transition to after a "while"? Wouldn't that make the firm job paying by contributing heavy hours to a leveraged law firm for the high-level introduction to the corporate clients whose in-house counsel jobs would go far to returning you to regular hours at a comfortable but not exorbitant wage in return for the complete surrender of your law license into their keeping?

Beliefs

In order to fully assimilate to firm life, it is necessary to not only change student’s actions, but also the beliefs that inform those actions. The indoctrination begins early, even before the first class is held.

The Application Process

In my experience, many students choose law schools based in large part on the US News rankings. Picking a law school based on ranking is easy: someone has already done all the work for you. US News has complex mathematical formulas to prove their work is objective, so why would anyone pick the #10 school when #5 is clearly better?

• When you think about it, this is a remarkable mistake, a category error, equivalent to assuming that the way for a teacher to pick a spouse is to marry the person with the highest grade in the class. An education is not a commodity, but a series of relationships amounting to a life-altering experience. To assume that a news magazine's questionnaire-backed formula and echo-chamber can tell you anything about a personal choice is self-evident rubbish. If US News & World Report rated dresses, would you rush right out and choose the top-rated one without trying it on? Once again, I'm not attributing the idiocy to you: it's a madness of crowds, and its study reveals pearls of wisdom that you don't dive for here. But you could have asked how people were sold this delusion: it would have led you in interesting directions.

But just as students identify schools via their relevant numbers, so, too, will they come to identify themselves by those numbers. Again, this indoctrination starts with the application process. When applying to law schools, only two numbers matter: GPA and LSAT. Firms will later reinforce that identification with numbers, since firms mainly care about the applicant’s GPA. All the things that used to define a person (hobbies, etc) no longer matter.

• Only if you think cognitive distortion is irremediable. You are identifying a situation, which may or may not be widespread but is certainly not inevitable. One will only think of oneself as a number if one isn't otherwise treated as a human being. You are actually identifying a condition of social disorientation owing to the peculiar and psychologically unhelpful procedure called "law school." It can be changed, and if existing ways of doing things are slightly modified, so that students feel acknowledged as individuals, rather than as numeric components of the class with the best numbers on record, the cognitive distortion you refer to would clear up swiftly.

This belief – that numbers define us – is crucial to being integrated into firm life. That is because the one thing firms hold over many graduating students is another number: salary. If firms can get students to judge their self-worth by how much money they make, then they have a crucial advantage in getting those students to work for them despite all of the obvious drawbacks.

• Maybe. This might be true, but few law firms seem to me to put their stress on the money alone. A real analysis of law firm come ons might be productive, but that isn't what you're doing here.

The Culture of Spending

Students are willing to endure the drudgery of the week by looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. Come Thursday, students flock to Bar Review (conveniently sponsored by CLS) to spend their money, get drunk, and forget their lives. This ritual becomes habit, and when new associates finish their first horrible week at Big Law, they know exactly how to forget their troubles.

The lesson students take away is that things can make up for what is missing in their life. We can already see the beginning of this with student attendance at firm receptions. While these receptions are boring, people go anyway because they will get things (food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many students’ career choice. While working for a firm will be dull, people choose to do so anyway because they will get lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys.

Concluding Thoughts

While some law students do enter CLS planning to work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their law school experience was designed to have them do.

• The prevailing impression one gets from the last sections is how low the fences are that seem to you to comprise the prison house. If only people would find some better balance between work and life, and would refrain from cocktail parties, things would be so much better. And whatever one may say about the badness of law school--and I yield to no one in finding fault with it--it doesn't make you go to cocktail parties.

• So where does that leave us overall? Your goal is to show that the structure of experience in law school is designed to normalize the structure of experience in law firm employment. Sometimes your arguments in support seem to me to conflict with reality: you don't prove your facts, you simply assert them, and it occasionally seems to me you have not yet enough experience to know that you are asserting non-facts. Even so, your arguments have validity to the extent that the beliefs represented are widely-enough shared to constitute an alternate reality that affects social behavior. You don't follow that approach, but it seems to me that you might redraft to make use of the voting plugin of this wiki to assemble a questionnaire for your colleagues in order to gather some public opinion data if you can't find any already available.

• • I'm very interested in doing such a questionnaire. Is there a way for people to answer anonymously not just to other wiki users, but to you as well? I don't think I'll get very honest answers otherwise (e.g. everyone [myself included] talking on the wiki about how the curve affects behavior says that they've seen it in others, but never in themselves).

All votes are anonymous. Look at the documentation of the Vote Plugin. If you need help constructing a questionnaire, my assistant, IanSullivan or I can help you.

• Amanda, thanks for bringing up this topic. I have some thoughts/questions that I believe are relevant. A reason I keep hearing as to why I should work at a firm is that they provide the training that I will need to be able to use our degree in future practice. Common wisdom is that law school does not train you to be an attorney. I wonder why that is? Why don't law schools make more of an effort to train us? Why do they rely on employers to fulfill that goal? The only school I know of that makes a strong effort to give their graduates the work-training they need is Northeastern with its co-op program. I think that the lack of concrete, practical training may be another reason that students go from the classroom to the firm. -- JustinColannino - 20 Feb 2008