Big law firms: the new high school (only worse)

In an earlier post about job-attaining strategies, I noted that many new lawyers, particularly those who went straight through from high school to college to law school, with no intervening occupation, have difficulty transitioning from the application-based model of academic admissions to the anarchic, laissez faire world of the job market.

This got me thinking about law firm recruiting practices, which, for very large firms, often involves partners from the firm coming to law schools to conduct on-campus interviews with the top-ranking students. All the students have to do, generally, is submit their resumes to the school's career services office, which, in turn, submits the resumes to the firms, which pick out who they want to interview. After an on-campus interview, a couple of firms will likely invite you, along with a number of your classmates, to come to their offices for more interviewing. They'll generally take you and your compatriots to a nice dinner and probably get you drunk. And then there is the formality of the summer associateship, where the firm hires you to sit in an office and pretend to work for two months in the summer, and they pay you a completely excessive salary and take you out to many lavish dinners, and, assuming you don't completely turn them off to your personality, they offer you a job at the end of the summer. This is the way these things go. If you've got the resume, the grades, and a reasonable amount of people skills, they'll basically hand you a job with a 6-figure salary.

The thing is, you really have no agency in any of this. They give you a lot of material things, without really requiring you to demonstrate any special skills or ambition, and, after the lavish parties are over and you've accepted a job, they sit you in a lonely office and bring you stacks of papers to read and review, hoping you'll spend at least two years of your life doing this. The partner for whom you work is likely bitter about the fact that you are being paid upwards of $150,000 during your first year out of law school, and, because he or she knows that you aren't actually worth what you're being paid, he or she will attempt to extract every possible drop of productivity from you. Some means of such extraction include harshly-worded, sarcastic instructions; demands that you work 14-hour days; and belittling comments intended to remind you that your work is presumed incompetent, absent compelling evidence to the contrary. Most likely, this partner experienced the same thing as a young associate, and, like the frat boy bent on revenging the humiliations he experienced as a freshman, this partner will likely subject you to the maximum possible abuse.

In essence, your boss will treat you like a child: an abused, underappreciated, unwanted child. And your social life, at least among your fellow associates, will also resemble your life as a child. During my own summer associateship at a big law firm, I observed the firm's associates (and a few of its partners), whose ages ranged from 28 to 40 years old, engage in a large amount of gossip, and from this gossip, I learned which associate had slept with which other associate, and who was cheating on their spouses. I witnessed the parties being planned amidst extensive discussions over which associate would be invited and which would not, the decision to exclude being based on rationales ranging from "he's weird" to "she slept with Bert, which is, like, so gross." And, at parties and firm dinners, many of the associates drank as if they would never get the chance to do so again, as if they had snuck out of their parents house and were getting as drunk as possible as an act of rebellion. These 30-something professionals seemed to spend most of their free time becoming ragingly drunk and making offensive comments.

And it should come as no surprise that these young professionals would revert to the social patterns on children: they were treated as children by their employers, subject to a strict set of rules and, in essence, kept in their offices until "playtime" at the sports bar. Very few associates had any agency in terms of bringing in clients, choosing what cases to work on, or forming strategies, as most of this was dictated from above. And many had never been on the job market or worked at any job at which they had some degree of autonomy, so most had never developed the sort of adult skills necessary to experience a mature work or social life.

And I would imagine that the partners, who sort of perpetuate this child-like existence, not only repeat the way they were treated as associates, but also replicate the way that they are treated by their large corporate clients. Despite the fact that a BigLaw attorney's salary is large relative to that of the average American, it is often dwarfed by the multi-million (and sometimes billion) dollar budgets of the corporations that employ them. Corporate executives demand a great deal of their lawyers, since they are paying them millions of dollars to sort out their legal issues, and since a lawyer's credo is intense loyalty to his client. The work of the BigLaw corporate lawyer is often less about formulating strategies and more about the tedious, never-ending work of drafting corporate documents and ensuring compliance with various regulations and contract obligations, the type of work that can be simultaneously mentally straining and mind-numbing. So the cycle of abusive-parent-to-downtrodden child starts at the top, and works its way down to you, the peon with a 6-figure salary and way more debt than you had meant to get yourself into.

So think twice about that "offer that you can't refuse." Remember that time is, more often than not, more valuable than money. And the satisfaction of becoming an adult and using your personal agency to make things happen in the world is, without a doubt, something that money can never buy.