New and Improved(?) Outline

-- By AmandaHungerford - 11 Feb 2008

Here is my very rough outline. A caveat: I don't really know anything about firm life, and I haven't been to any firm receptions, so a lot of this is conjecture. Please let me know if I am wrong!/you have any suggestions. Thanks.

Introduction

Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students find themselves employed in law firms, vs. the whopping 4.3% of students who find themselves employed in public interest. That means that, out of 400 bright young minds, only 17 choose to go into a public interest career. So why such dramatic flocking to law 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.

What is driving the masses to the law firms seems to be not so much a series of well-reasoned decisions, but instead the result of years of acculturation. From the first day of law school (or even before), law students are assimilated into firm culture. The incentive for law schools to do so is clear: a partner at Cravath can donate much more money than a public defender in the Bronx.

Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture, both in their actions and in their beliefs.*

Practical Results

The Application Process

Thinking in Numbers The fact that law schools are ranked, and that decisions about which law school to attend are in large part based on those rankings, introduce us to a way of thinking will become more and more dominant in both law school and law firms. When others assign a number to everything, you don't have to do the thinking - someone else has already done it for you.

Numbers as Identity to Selves Numbers will also come to reflect how we think of ourselves. First it is identification with the ranking of the school we attend. Then it is our GPA. Finally, it is how much money we make.

Numbers as Identity to Others Law school begins the make us think of us as numbers. The two most important things to a law school is our GPA and our LSAT -- all the rest is fluff. Firms reinforce our identification with numbers. All those factors that used to be important (hobbies, interests, etc) don't matter to firms. They don't want to know whether we play the oboe; they want to know what our GPA is.

Decision in Numbers Law firms, like law schools, are ranked. Again, we can make our decision based on someone else's arbitrary numerical assignment. The fact that we make a life decision (where to work) based on numbers reinforces their value in our own lives: they aren't arbitrary, they are meaningful. And if they are meaningful when describing a firm, they must be meaningful when describing me, too.

Sacrificing Relationships

Unnecessary Pace Law school doesn't need to be so time-consuming. Do we really need to read that many cases on personal jurisdiction? But having so little free time in law school gets us used to having little free time when we go to firms. By that time, sacrificing personal relationships for The Law will be standard.

I'll Do It Tomorrow The sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it'll just be like this until IL is over; then, it'll just be like this until law school is over; then, it will just be like this until I make partner. By framing it thus we lose sight of how big a sacrifice we are actually making.

Forced Bonding The pace forces us to spend time with our law students, inside and outside of the classroom. Because of the large workload, even when we're not in class, we're often thinking about law school. Because most of our experiences involve law school, the people we relate best to are other law students. We hang out more and more with law students, and then really only relate to other law students. We forget there are other lifestyles out there, and that it doesn't have to be this crazy.

Ideals

The Curve

We Can't All Be Winners The curve is our first indication that we aren't in college anymore, Toto. We won't just be measured on our own merits, but also on the merits of others. (We got our first taste of this with the application process. The LSAT is designed to be a bell curve. And it's a curve that can't be beaten; no one will care if I get a 175 if by some freak accident everyone else that year gets a 176).

The Sociology of the Curve In subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the curve affects our interactions with others. In the back of our minds, helping others seems more risky, since if Classmate X gets an A, my odds of getting an A decrease. The same will be true when we get to a law firm, since only a fraction of people can make partner.

The Culture of Spending

Cycle of Spending We go through the drudgery of every week looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. We put up with boredom and tedium, and then reward ourselves by spending lots of money and getting drunk (thus forcefully forgetting how much our lives suck).

The Law School Helps Bar Review encourages this cycle absolutely

Working for the Weekend This practice is just short-term delayed gratification. And is it even that gratifying? It must be; everyone else is doing it. Besides, it's better than thinking about Con Law. This gets us ready for our post-CLS life, where we will do boring, intensive work every week, and then spend lots of money and get drunk every weekend to avoid thinking about it.

Firm Receptions Firm receptions also prepare us for this cycle. They're boring, but we go to them anyway because: - There's free stuff (food, booze, toys) - Everyone else is doing it

Concluding Thoughts

*Disclaimer: For the sake of simplicity, I have broken the processes used to socialize law students into discrete categories (practical results and ideals). I do, however, realize that in practice these processes often have overlapping effects: the curve, for instance, changes both students’ behavior and their beliefs.

---

You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:

# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, AmandaHungerford

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list