Rough draft #1. Comments welcome.

-- By AmandaHungerford - 11 Feb 2008

Introduction

Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students find themselves employed in law firms, vs. the 4.3% of students who find themselves employed in public interest. 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 seems to be driving the masses to the law firms are 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 Curve

The curve is one of the first big shocks of coming to law school. With it, we are effectively told that we won’t just be measured on our own merits, but also on the merits of others. In subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the curve thus affects our interactions with others. Suddenly, helping others becomes much less attractive, because by doing so we are decreasing our own odds of success. This mode of thinking (self before others) will seem normal by the time we reach the law firm, where (since only a fraction of people can make partner) we will once again be measured as against other people.

I doubt the you-against-the-world mentality is accidental. It is helpful to firms, since in the legal world, lawyers will be judge not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’. There are other ways of practicing law, but the adversarial system is the one Big Law uses, and so it is the one law students (and associates) are socialized into.

Sacrificing Relationships

ILs entering law school quickly find that the pace is frenetic, and the work is all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Ever since law schools added a (notoriously undemanding) third year, it seems more than likely that the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly throughout all years. 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 that time, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the standard.

No person would willingly sign up for a lifetime of sacrifice, so the sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it’ll just e 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 people lose sight of how large a sacrifice they are actually making. The practice of choosing work over family becomes ingrained without us realizing what is happening.

Ideals

The Application Process

While colleges have unique personalities that lead students to pick one over the other, in my experience many students choose law schools based in large part on their ranking. Picking a law school based on it’s ranking is easy: someone has already done all the work of compiling information for you. They have complex mathematical formulas to prove their work is objective; given all this, why would anyone pick the #10 school when the #5 is clearly better?

But just as students identify schools via their relevant numbers, so, too, will they come to identify themselves by those numbers. Again, this process starts with the application process. When applying to law schools, only two numbers matter: GPA and LSAT score. Firms will come to reinforce that identification with numbers, since when apply to firms, the only relevant factor is the applicant’s GPA. All the factors that used to be important (hobbies, skills, etc) in defining the person no longer matter.

This new 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.

The Culture of Spending

Students are willing to endure the drudgery of every 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 how horrible their lives have seemed. This ritual becomes habit, and when new associates finish their first horrible week at Big Law, they know exactly how to forget about their troubles. The cycle of drudgery-indulgence-drudgery is a self-perpetuating one: associates feel they can only survive the monotony of the week by indulging in excess on the weekend, but they can only afford to indulge their habits if they continue to put up with the monotony of the workweek.

The belief law students take away from their experiences is that things – food, alcohol, and fancy toys – can make up for all that 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 (a) their friends are going and (b) they will get things (again, food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many people’s career decisions. While they recognize that working for a firm will be dull, they choose to do so anyway because (a) their friends are going to and (b) because doing so will get them lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys.

Concluding Thoughts

While some law students do legitimately enter law school planning to go 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 entire law school experience was designed to have them do.

*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.

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