There’s one thing every lawyer, no matter how miserable, seems to agree on: law school wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was kind of fun.
Things take a nosedive when you get to a firm. That’s when you start hating life.
Maybe we should take a look at this phenomenon, and ask ourselves why this might be the case.
There are a few prominent disparities between the experience of law school and that at a big law firm.
First – in law school when you work hard, you get a reward. There is an “incentive” for “doing your best.”
I remember a guy in my class at NYU who used to grow an exam beard every semester. He’d stop shaving a couple of weeks before exams. The beard would start to get scraggly – then, after the last bluebook was filled with scribble, he’d shave it off and everyone would hit a bar to celebrate.
It was silly, light-hearted fun, designed to focus attention on completing a goal.
Contrast that to a law firm, where nothing is silly, light-hearted or fun – and there is no such thing as completing a goal.
At a firm, you don’t “complete goals.” Thanks to your massive student loans, you are now someone’s property, and you work to avoid punishment. That means you work until midnight, then go in on the weekend. Rinse. Repeat. There is no end of semester. There is no end of the week. There is no end of anything. There is no vacation. There is no end.
Your reward for working harder than you’ve ever worked in your life? If you do a good job, no one complains – and you get more work.
That is, unless there isn’t any work, in which case you’re in trouble, because that means you’re not going to make your billables, which means you’re a parasite and a useless drain on the firm and you should feel terrible about yourself and fear for your job.
It’s also possible that you didn’t do a very good job on whatever it was you were working on harder than you’ve worked on anything in your entire life. That might be because you’ve been working eighty hour weeks with no vacation and receiving a steady stream of criticism, all the while fearing for your job, which is a problem because you have a wife who wants to have a kid and you’re $180,000 in debt. The Zoloft and Klonopin your shrink prescribed don’t seem to be doing the trick. Nor does the Adderall you’re popping with alarming frequency – the left-over Adderall from the first shrink, who diagnosed you with ADHD before the second one decided it was actually depression and anxiety.
It might be that all the other work you did for the past six months at the firm was good, or even very good – until you handed in this latest assignment, which wasn’t good. However, at a law firm, if you do something that isn’t good, it doesn’t matter if you did one hundred other things that were good. You did something that wasn’t good, which means you are bad.
The reason this thing wasn’t good might be that you had no idea what you were doing because they gave you something unbelievably, insanely, laughably complicated to do over the weekend with a totally inadequate explanation.
That brings me to a second way in which law firms are not like law school.
In law school when something’s complicated, you study it slowly until you understand it. The professor will point out that the Erie Rules, for example, are tricky, and note that it may take a few weeks – or most of a semester – to navigate these treacherous waters of legal doctrine.
That doesn’t happen at a law firm. The only time anyone takes a good long time to explain something to you at a law firm is during one of those CLE classes, where they kill half a day on the same “legal ethics” material you learned back in law school, when it was painfully obvious and boring the first time around. That, they spend hours on.
Then you return to your desk, where there’s a voice message from a partner, who wants a lengthy research memo done over the weekend on the tax consequences of the securitization of synthetic reverse-flip butterfly warrant-backed double interest-rate insurance SWAP options denominated in Italian Lire, if held, pre-fiscal 2004, under a dual-indemnified Barbados limited partnership irrevocable charitable trust.
Actually, he’d like something emailed to him by Sunday, so he’ll have time to look at it before he meets with the client on Monday morning. This is a client you’ve never met and never will meet. In fact, you’re not sure who the client is, since you don’t usually work for this partner. You’re not even sure what this deal is about. You’re not even sure if you remember exactly what a “derivative” is, especially since it’s Friday at 6 pm, and you are officially supposed to be a first-year real estate associate except that, due to the financial collapse, there no longer is a real estate department. Before you do anything you have to cancel your trip home this weekend for your little sister’s bat-mitzvah and listen to your mother deliver a guilt trip. Then you have to stay up all night in the library, sorting through financial arcanalia about a deal you don’t understand. Then, relying heavily upon the miracle of Adderall, you have to apply recondite legal principles to a hazy fact pattern while trying not to fall asleep or burst into tears.
In law school, answering this research question would constitute a semester’s work in an advanced seminar and probably result in a journal article. You would be a super-stud if you got a B in the course.
At the firm, pretty much whatever you hand in – even if written in your own blood – will be viewed with disdain as “not up to snuff” and “poor work product” and you will be asked if this is really the best you can do and it will be hinted that “maybe you aren’t cut out for this place.” If you are fired, you will never be quite certain if it is because of this assignment or simply because the firm is imploding and you’re being cut along with half the other associates and three partners, who were originally supposed to work in the now non-existent real estate department.
In short, if law school is a pleaser’s vision of heaven – then law firms are the pleaser version of Hades. Instead of kindly law professors handing out A’s at the end of the semester, there’s a partner who considers you a chattel. He’s not handing out anything, unless you screw up, in which case you will get your ass handed to you.
The “semester” ends when you’re laid off, fired or suffer a mental and/or physical breakdown.
You’ve seen the look on the first years’ faces when a month or two goes by, it’s no longer the summer program, and they start to realize they’re in it for real.
They’re not in Kansas anymore.
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This piece is part of a series of columns presented by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.
If you enjoy these columns, please check out The People’s Therapist’s new book, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning
I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy
(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.)
The People's Therapist 
Quite possibly the most accurate description of working at a big law firm I’ve ever read.
[…] No longer in Kansas « The People’s Therapist. […]
Wow. Let’s stipulate that the above scenario (while a bit cartoonish) can and does happen at most law firms at times. But . . . I dunno, ain’t this a little bit much? Law firm life can be hard. Gotcha. So what? Your reward is that you get paid a lot of money and you get to work on interesting cases/deals. If it gets really hard at times, yeah, well, maybe you should look for other work.
I think the biggest problem you identified: people pleasers. If you do anything in life just so folks can tell you how great you are, you are in for a treadmill you cannot get off. Satisfaction comes from within, from your family, from God, whatever, but not from a partner showering you with praise.
You aren’t a lawyer are you…at least not in big law. This post is insanely accurate!
Totally, 100% accurate. Especially the insanely difficult “I need this by Sunday” assignment. I had EXACTLY that assignment my first month at the firm and my earnest-but-not-sufficient job on the first draft haunted me the next three years, never mind that the second draft of the impossible memo was perfectly good. I always felt like the miller’s daughter from Rumpelstiltskin whenever I sat down at my desk — all this work to do and no clue how to even begin.
…I have yet to see a BigLaw friend burning the midnight oil on a Friday night, or even checking his blackberry.
Yes, there are some portions like described above, where there is a frenetic work pace and heavy, deadline driven workload…but this also happens in advertising, accounting, and consulting.
Oh and btw, when I was a consultant and working till 2 a.m., I wasn’t working from the comforts of my home office downtown from my Manhattan apt. armed with my $40 in seamless web.
No no…instead, I was stationed in the middle of nowhere America, in a cramped conference room with 6 other people…and then I had to eat mixed nuts in my hotel room when finishing up the work, because the 3 fast food restaurants nearby had closed hours ago.
Oh…and I also got paid $53,000 for all of this.
You get paid $200,000 starting salary at a BigLaw firm.
Let’s repeat: you get paid $200,000 starting salary at a BigLaw firm.
Gee, there is one other tiny difference between being in law school and being in a law firm:
law school: $45,000 per annum FROM you TO school
law firm: $160,000 per annum FROM firm TO you
Any associate willing to pay me $45,000 for the privilege of working at my firm will most assuredly get better treatment. Otherwise, he or she had better be prepared to work damned hard.
Look, we get the drill and, by and large, associates are willing to look hard, but would it kill you to act like a human being? Profits per partner don’t correspond to levels of douchiness.
Was this post supposed to offer me advice, or was it just supposed to make me feel worse than I did before I read it? FYI, it only accomplished the latter.
West Wing: “Law school bares little resemblance to the actual practice of law.”
Or:
My Cousin Vinny: “They [law school] teach ya contracts, and precedent. Then the firm that hires you, they teach ya the procedure. Or you can go to court an’ watch.”
And people thought such lines were merely entertainment value.
Excellent description. It’s been a decade since I practiced and your post brought it right back. The having to skip the bat mitzvah was a nice touch!
It doesn’t exactly amaze me that so many commenters seem to think abuse is OK as long as you get paid enough–but I’m sad for them. Self-worth is freaking priceless.
Thank you for continuing to point out the problems with BigLaw, and in general, for your insight. This may sound hokey, but earlier this year several of your posts helped me come to terms with the fact that I hated my job and need more from life. I am now free from the “golden handcuffs” and pursuing my own business. It is an emotional roller-coaster filled with highs (“Yes! I can do this!”) and lows (“Oh my G-d, what have I done walking away from that salary!”) but bottom-line there is emotion, there is life, as opposed to the void of associate work. I’m not sure that I would have started to find myself again if it had not been for your website. Thank you.
I’m so glad I decided not to try to become a lawyer.
I can see myself at law school. But I value sleep over anything. I would definitely not survive Big Law.
Will says:
“There’s one thing every lawyer, no matter how miserable, seems to agree on: law school wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was kind of fun.”
Fun isn’t a word I would use to describe law school.
Although it was a better experience than college.
But it still involved extreme boredom. I was just there to get my ticket punched. I quickly figured out that I didn’t really have much interest in the subject matter at all, so I avoided class whenever possible.
More or less spot on, my friend.
Biglaw firms look like madhouses to me. Deadly hours, stultifying work, mean, passive-aggressive partners…yikes.
I clerked after law school and one of the judges I worked for offered to call up a partner at a leading firm in my city to help get me a job there. I politely demurred. I ended up in the public sector instead and (after paying my dues at a high-stress legal aid office for several years) now have an interesting, challenging NGO job with normal hours. Sometimes I wish I’d tried out the law firm life, but then I read articles like these and remember why I opted not to reach for that particular golden ring.
You have just painted the bland and dark portrait of my future, one I’ve been told again and again from bored partners and depressed associates. Yet I still choose to continue with it. Perhaps I need to see an actual therapist. Great blog, though!
So, work is hard? It’s not like you didn’t know what you are getting into.
The People’s Therapist may have played things up just a bit for dramatic effect, but there is most definitely a kernel of truth to everything he wrote. I’ve been there, done that, and didn’t even get the t-shirt.
My career path was:
3 years SMALLAW
5 years BIGLAW
1 year SMALLCONSULTING (quasi-in-house counsel)
5 years BIGCORP (in-house counsel)
Today, I’m still in-house counsel, but at a different company. I’m primary counsel for a substantial business unit of a BIGCORP. It’s fantastic. Lots of autonomy, executive contact and best of all, I leave the office at 5:30 and don’t work weekends.
My career at BIGLAW lasted 5 years (during the dot-com crash no less) because I knocked on every partner’s door and asked for work. Yes, I pulled all-nighters and worked weekends, holidays, etc… I canceled vacations and cut back on visits to family out of state. All this was to hold on to my job and ride out the economy. I might still be at my old BIGLAW firm if I had been fortunate enough to have hitched my wagon to a partner with a large book and eventually made of counsel or partner myself. I wasn’t this lucky; the book of the partner I worked for had been dot-coms and it imploded. I had a small book I was building, but it wasn’t enough to pay for my upkeep and the firm’s cut. So I worked my contacts to land a job at a small consulting firm that I knew would eventually lead me in house.
For those of you who are in BIGLAW or looking to go there, realize that there is far more outside that little coocoon than you could ever know. Opportunities to learn and grow as a lawyer abound – but you must network as much as possible to discover them. No one is going to hand you a great position in-house, government, law firm, etc… if you just sit there and bill hours for a partner. You’ll be making him financially rich and stifling your career.
fantastic – absolutely dead on correct
I lived this. I agree wholeheartedly with your piece here. Excellent. Best description of the practice of law that I have ever seen.
I found the opposite to be true. With grade normalization (I laughed out loud when I read the “all A’s portion of this blog! Where is that happening?), stodgy professors, and the “lemming” mentality of law students, law school became, for me at least, less about learning and more about competition.
Have now been in practice for several years, I have found the work intensely rewarding and pleasurable. I am fortunate to have an amazing boss, and work in an area which is full of wonderful lawyers looking to mentor and truly educate those of us who are moving up in the ranks. Could I make more money working at some jumbo firm with a 90hour/week schedule? I imagine so, but misery is just not worth it!
For those of you who are unhappy with your practice with big box operations FIND ANOTHER JOB! Life is much to short to work at a job you hate for people who you resent. There are many more opportunity at small to mid sized law firms to find professional satisfaction and still have a life. If you decide to stay where you are, feel free to call me when its time for your divorce :).
Amazingly accurate description. That pretty much sums up my 3.5 years at BigLaw. Thank you, through your many posts, for making me feel normal. It didn’t work for me, but not because there’s something wrong with me. I left 6 months ago, and life is much better on the other side.
I hated law school: the rote learning, the grade competition, the intellectual shallowness, the near-illiteracy of a lot of legal writing, the political correctness, the financial stress, the measuring of self-worth based on your GPA (because it means everything in the profession), the starvation of the imagination, the meanness and conformity.
My current job is a lot better, but I still see traces of the above (sometimes more than traces) in my field – and I’m in the NGO/public sector.
My God, what a crybaby you are. Get over yourself. Most of the sh** you are bitching about happens to be about LIFE and WORKING, not just being a LAWYER. Waah, I have to put in lots of hours. Waah, my spouse wants to have a child. Waah, I don’t get hugs and/or pats on the back for being competent.
Do something else with your life. Become a teacher. Earn $32,000 per year, jump through endless clock hours, trainings, and testing hoops, be chastized and/or fired when your unmotivated, poverty-stricken students don’t meet Adequate Yearly Progress on their State tests, work from 7:30 am until 8:00 pm and teach summer school and coach at night and on weekends besides, to make a little extra money…. it goes on and on. No sympathy here.
Teachers working harder than lawyers… I’ll LOL for that!
In some respects, I think this post actually understates downside in that its premise is that your legal career is split between the “fun part” (law school) and the “crappy part” (practising law).
Unfortunately, for many of us, part I doesn’t exist.
I found law school to be a horrible experience (if by “law school” you mean the study of law rather than the hours spent outside of school actually living life, which were some of the best years of my life…).
The Socratic Method was, to me, an insanely inefficient way of transmitting information, and did little to “help you think like a lawyer.” Hyper-competition among law students was appalling and left me hating almost every single one of them. Being surrounded by aggressive and arrogant classmates while learning material that, 15 years later, I have yet to use in practice, was simply a harbinger of things to come. Lawyers don’t have the highest rates (among professionals) of alcoholism, drug addition, and suicide for nothing, you know….