An editor at AboveTheLaw suggested some months back that I do a piece on the US News & World Report law school rankings. For whatever reason, this stodgy old weekly news magazine – which someone must still read – has created a sideline business publishing rankings of schools, including law schools. I’m not sure what the criteria are, but at least in theory, it’s a big deal for lawyers when the list comes out each year.
The rankings seem designed to make official what everyone knows anyway, i.e., that there are “prestige” schools that are harder to get into. But like any good opinion piece, they throw in a few twists – familiar names in unexpected places. It boils down to dissing one of the big places, or unexpectedly anointing a second-rank outfit. That way everyone can get riled up over the respective rankings of my school versus your school.
It sounded kind of boring, so I filed the idea away.
Then it started to gnaw at me. The US News list seemed like a good example of the amazing lengths lawyers go to in order to distinguish themselves from one another. The entire profession splits hairs like this because the career path is so conservative there isn’t much to distinguish one attorney from another. Every lawyer lines up to take the LSAT, then get processed and distributed to law schools based on hairline distinctions. In class you sit through identical lectures, take identical exams, and head off – for the most part – to identical firms to do nearly identical work.
You end up arguing over the details.
The law school curriculum is pretty much the same thing wherever you go – it’s standardized. I doubt the property law lecture at a “top” law school is much different, let along superior, to a property law lecture at a less “prestigious” place.
But, of course the students are “better” at the more prestigious school – because they did better on their LSAT. How much better? Some tiny fraction of a percentage, probably, representing a few questions that they got right and someone else got wrong.
I worked with one lawyer who went to a “second-tier” law school in New York, but rose to the top of his class and made law review. He said he still faces resistance at top firms because of snobbery over where he went to school – even though he’s been out and working for eight years. Those Yale and Harvard lawyers at the big firms, he says, turn their noses up at his top of the class record at a “lesser” school – as well as his federal clerkship and the years of hard work that followed.
I’m currently working with a couple of young lawyers who find themselves in the odd position of trying to decide how to appraise the “value” of a “top school.” One woman was accepted at a “top” place, but offered a full scholarship at a “second-tier” institution. Is it worth $150k to go to the prestige school? The education itself will be nearly identical. Is the snob value worth it? According to one of my clients, half the kids at Columbia Law are struggling to find jobs right now, so it doesn’t sound like the “top “ places are pulling their weight. On the other hand, maybe it’s even worse coming out of a “second tier” joint. Crucially, though – with no debt, she wouldn’t be as desperate as everyone else. I see plenty of young lawyers emerging from “top schools” (and every other kind of school) with shaky job prospects, huge debt and – worst of all – the sense that going to law school was a mistake. The debt reduces them to indentured servitude, making it impossible to do anything else, at least until they’ve paid the piper.
How about the law firms themselves? Surely some are “better” than others?
This week’s question comes from L, in New York City. She asks:
I feel self-conscious sometimes about the pessimism of this column with regard to law as a career path. That pessimism reflects what I see every day in my practice – miserable lawyers.
My patient was clearly miserable in her job as a graduate student and laboratory scientist. But she’d worked very hard to get into this position. And she was only 3 years away from a PhD.
be the next Beyonce.
With the arrival of agriculture and domesticated livestock – and much greater population densities – greater specialization arrived. The Middle Ages in Europe saw the rise of guilds – early unions for skilled laborers. There was also more leisure time – at least for the wealthy classes – so artists and musicians began to appear. A king or a duke might hire you simply to set gemstones on snuff boxes, so he could hand them out as keepsakes.
The real question, then, isn’t how you can find something you can do. It’s who are you, and what is the job that reflects your authentic identity.
Sometimes we run from the truth of who we are. My graduate student patient had ended up studying science mostly because it was practical. She was an immigrant from China, and pretty good at math and science, and she needed something practical, that could get her to the United States, but didn’t require perfect English skills.
I had a patient who went to law school and struggled to make a career as a corporate attorney, but he was miserable. The odd thing was that his entire family worked as teachers. I finally asked him why he hadn’t become a teacher like everyone else. He thought about it and said he’d wanted to be different. Being a teacher seemed like giving up and admitting he was like everyone else in his family.
My patient was telling me about his new job.
This week’s question is from Laure, in Canada. She writes:
The phrase “addicted to oil” gets bandied about a lot with reference to the USA’s massive reliance upon – and consumption of – fossil fuels.
The second factor spurring addiction is aggression. As the addict awakens to the cost of his behavior, it begins to take on a different tinge – it becomes about anger. As one of my clients, a recovered alcoholic, told me – when you’re doing something so obviously self-destructive, there’s always a “to hell with it” attitude running things, an attitude of aggression. You can wrap yourself up in excuses, but deep down every addict knows what he’s doing is not only self-destructive, but destructive, period. Feeding the addiction becomes an outlet for aggression.
It will take more than a single morning-after and one bad hang-over to wake this country up to its addiction. At very least, it will require hitting a true bottom – like the environmental holocaust happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico. After this calamity, there can be no more denying how far things have gone. The USA is a sad case. A wreck. Let’s be realistic – we’re hard-core users. If that oil weren’t swirling in deadly currents in the Gulf and the Atlantic right now, it would be burning in power plants and a million internal combustion engines, its deadly currents rising into our atmosphere to wreak a different kind of havoc. We’re unleashing astonishing destruction each and every day. We know that.
We are Americans and we are fossil fuel addicts. We know it is bad for us. We know it is bad for our neighbors and our family – the Earth and every species on it. The question is whether this is it – we’ve hit bottom – or whether we’ll go right back to bingeing. How bad does it have to get? Can we get clean, or will we continue as we have been – following in the footsteps of so many addicts before us – killing ourselves and wrecking the lives of others.
We’re there. Take a look at the pictures of wildlife destroyed by this spill.
I summered at Shearman & Sterling way back in 1996. Judging from my clients’ feedback, the summer associate “experience” at big law firms hasn’t changed much over the years. With the recession, it’s harder to get a summer associate position – but once you’re in, it’s pretty much the same old thing – or maybe the same old thing on lysergic acid diethylamide. It was a pretty weird experience to begin with.
This week, on “The Alternative” with Terry LeGrand, we talked about dating, and internet dating in particular, including some advice on putting together an online dating profile.
If you love his show, you can become a Terry LeGrand “fan” on Facebook 
A lot of people thought Ludwig van Beethoven was an unpleasant person.
Here’s a letter I received recently. Yes, it’s real, but I’ve removed anything identifiable to protect the sender:
The People's Therapist 