In law, if you’re making big money, you’re working for the bad guys. That’s the sad truth.
I’m not talking about defending vicious criminals. I mean tougher cases – like representing the 1% of the world who own everything.
Deep in the recesses of big law, you might not realize who you’re working for. From where you’re standing, your boss is the firm. Juniors report to seniors. Seniors report to partners. Partners report to God.
In reality, up, over the partner’s head, there’s someone called “the client” – a possessor of vast wealth. Normal people don’t hire biglaw – the owners-of-everything do, and they don’t get uber-rich being nice. Things only get worse when they’re dealing with lawyers.
If and when you actually meet “the client,” you might feel like an Imperial Stormtrooper aboard the Death Star:
Lord Vader? Great to meet you, Sir. Yes, absolutely, the torture chamber is under control. Yes sir, we just checked the planetary death ray this morning. One hundred percent ready to go. My pleasure, Sir.
Then the client walks away, and you play that same argument in your head: You have one hundred and seventy grand in school loans. They’re going to blow the planet up anyway. You’re not torturing anyone personally.
Some lawyers learn to embrace the evil – to “go with it.” I knew a guy in law school who left to work for a firm that did nothing – NOTHING – but defend Big Tobacco. We ribbed him about it. In fact, we regarded him as a stinking pile of vomit. His response was to chain-smoke and brag about money. He disappeared to a hateful red state to work black voodoo, and by now he’s no doubt worth millions. Loathed by millions, too.
My first taste of evil came early at Sullivan & Cromwell. It was a deal for Goldman Sachs with an amusing codename: “Project Rolex.” At the closing I finally encountered the client – and the wry humor of i-bankers: He wore the largest gold wristwatch ever made.
I developed a fascination with Mr. Rolex. His name was all over documents I’d been staring at for weeks. The deal – a securitization of mortgages on a package of investment properties in the Mid-West – suburban strip malls and cheap hotels on interstates – was worth half a billion dollars. As I generated documents, I took guesses at his net worth. If it wasn’t a billion, it was darn close. A guy who met Bill Gates at a technology convention wrote a piece admitting all he could think about while they shook hands was “$500 per second. $500 per second. $500 per second.” Same thing with this client: I couldn’t believe how much money he had.
After weeks of late nights, the partner asked me to arrange catering for the closing. The choice was the standard Sullivan & Cromwell breakfast with rolls and bagels or the “deluxe” breakfast, with lox. For Mr. Rolex, I pulled out the stops and ordered deluxe.
He stormed into the room the next morning, sporting a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and the giant gleaming timepiece. I was awestruck.
But Mr. Rolex was not in a good mood. He turned to the partner:
“This is no good. I can’t sign all this shit. I’ll be here all day, you fucking asshole.”
Apologies were mumbled. It was a lot of paperwork. On the other hand, the client was mortgaging about 400 commercial properties, most worth millions. We’d been generating paperwork day and night for weeks.
Rolex eventually relented, mumbling obscenities, and started signing. He whipped out the largest gold pen ever made and circled the tables, shouting into a cell phone.
Here’s what a man worth half a billion dollars shouts while he signs documents earning himself another half a billion dollars:
“Brenda. Tell that fucking pilot at Teterboro to hold the fucking plane. Don’t be a fucking idiot, just do it. Tell him I don’t fucking care. And put the right fucking food on. I can’t eat that shit. Assholes. I’ll tell you what to do about Jeff. Put his fucking shit out on the lawn and take his fucking keys. Dan, too. Lock them out of the fucking building. Fuck their families. They’re fucking fired. I don’t know when I’ll be fucking back. What are you, retarded? These fuckers are wasting my fucking life. This is bullshit. No – he’s fired, too. I don’t give a crap….”
It took our client less than an hour to “execute” the documents. He shouted “fuck” three dozen times, fired five people, then stormed out of the room.
We stood in silence. I began helping the paralegals gather up the papers. We ate the deluxe breakfast.
The next day, the partner told me never to order the deluxe breakfast again without prior clearance. The client refused to pay the extra hundred and fifty bucks.
There can be no doubt Mr. Rolex left his mother’s womb screaming abuse into a cell phone. There is no possibility he was ever a nice person. He made me feel sorry for the partner – who, himself, was not a nice person.
Your client might not be floridly evil like Mr. Rolex. He might be boringly, namelessly evil. Most litigators tell me their clients are anonymous banks suing or being sued over anonymous ill-fated investments. They know perfectly well these banks are run by bankers who merrily screw their clients because all they care about is making money for themselves. If these litigators drilled deeper, to find out who owned the anonymous banks, they’d find Mr. Rolex sputtering into a cell phone – but they don’t want to go there.
One of the joys of earning less money at law is working for the good guys, or the less-bad guys. You get to help people who actually need it.
I worked with a biglaw lawyer who recently left for the SEC, thrilled to be protecting investors instead of i-banks. On the other hand, I worked with a guy who left the FTC for biglaw, and found himself defending the same sleazy supplement manufacturers he used to prosecute. Needless to say, the first lawyer was happier – but working for evil pays better.
It’s a trade-off. Everything’s a trade-off. But it’s worth something to know you’re on the side of the good guys. Maybe that’s a luxury, if you’ve got loans to pay. But it’s also a goal to shoot for while keeping your eyes on the ultimate prize: doing work that means something to you.
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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 
It isn’t just big law. I think most lawyers are forced to represent the bad guys to make enough money to make the profession worth it. After being at my small firm for a year, we landed a new client from our website. The client’s business seemed shady, and after a little digging, I came to suspect the client’s profit came from predatory lending targeting young enlisted soldiers. I brought this fact up to my partner and I was told in no uncertain terms that a client’s ethics were none of my business, and that they didn’t pay me to dig up dirt on our own clients. I told myself if it wasn’t our client, someone else would step into this market and do the same thing. But it didn’t help me sleep at night, and looking back, it was the absolute moment where I realized that I didn’t fit in, and started to suspect that I might never fit in.
yes, then you realize the ‘good guys’ are just bad guys without money, but they seem to think that you have tons of it so not paying you is just one step up that ladder of success. Yeah, good luck with that ‘good guy’ thing.
Way too simplistic, some of the worst clients I’ve ever had to deal with have been pro bono clients…demanding and pricks
Very true.
man fuck this article. i want a fucking bagel and lox.
And then you realize that not everyone with money is evil. And not all legal representation is soul-selling. I’ve represented very wealthy corporations who want to ensure compliance with international corruption laws, so we develop compliance programs for them. We investigate violations for them. We help them to be better corporate citizens.
And then there are the totally mundane matters for rich clients—they are a third party to some action and need our assistance preparing for an interview/deposition/trial testimony.
Having money (and making money) does not equal evil.
Isn’t it funny how the people with the most money are often the most paranoid about ‘losing’ it?
The more you have, the more you need to protect…
Yeah it’s so funny that as there is more at stake the measures taken to protect it grow accordingly.
Getting life insurance once you have kids? What’s that about?! Rigid security and safety procedures at nuclear power plants? Oh, the paranoia!
“Everyone needs counsel” applies to the bad guys, too. If you have any faith in the system at all (and if you don’t, why are you a lawyer?), you have to believe that the best outcome is one where every party has zealous representation. The lawyer’s job isn’t to look for the most just outcome; that’s the judge’s/jury’s job. I just never felt bad about representing anyone. And do you really believe that every big corporation is evil? Really? Sorry, I just can’t go there.
Erin says:
““Everyone needs counsel” applies to the bad guys, too. If you have any faith in the system at all (and if you don’t, why are you a lawyer?), you have to believe that the best outcome is one where every party has zealous representation. The lawyer’s job isn’t to look for the most just outcome; that’s the judge’s/jury’s job. I just never felt bad about representing anyone.”
No, the best outcome is the outcome in which morally appropriate given the situation.
Zealous representation probably isn’t the best idea in some cases.
“The system” is an improvement over the previous system of trial by ordeal and trial by ordeal. I certainly don’t “believe in the system”. I believe that “the system” is better than Justice 1.0.
If you want to read an amusing historical account of justice, read Blood and Roses.
My fault for slopping wording (not good for a lawyer). I should have said that the best way we’ve come up with to reach the best outcome in the most cases possible is to have zealous representation on both sides, trusting that a dialectical process will result in the trust/best outcome more often that under any other system. Which is, I think, what you’re saying.
Thanks. You’ve given me just enough information (plus a little misdirection, but not too much) to identify the client.
Not sure that’s what yuou had intended.
Wow – that would be odd. I don’t remember his name, and I’m not sure where he is or what he’s doing. Obviously, the nature of the assets is pure fiction.
This might be the worst post that has ever gone up on this site. Making money is not evil. The little guy is not automatically good. While some rich people might be assholes, assuming that all rich people are assholes is the same kind of dangerous thinking that allowed generations of discrimination against women, gays, and ethnic and religious minorities.
Besides, well over half the fights in high-end legal practice involve rich v. rich. The remainder is mostly rich v. megarich, rich v. rich plaintiff’s lawyers, pro bono work, etc. Sure, there are transactional practices in which biglaw enables the rich to get away with some seedy crap–but those deals are hardly the majority.
You can cherry-pick a few examples, distort them, and then extrapolate out to the conclusion that biglaw = evil–or, you could admit that your view of biglaw is based on limited, personal experience and is colored by your disdain for (and, I might add, failure in) that field.
I really like your column when it focuses on the misery of being an associate– a topic on which you seem to be qualified to offer observations based on actual real-world experience. This column could have been about how working for evil clients can be a miserable experience–something you actually experienced. The jump to “all biglaw is doing evil for evil people” might have been a tad much, though.
I agree. This seems almost childish for someone who is normally very insightful. Keep up the good work with the other articles. I really enjoy the site.
Also agreed. I do not assume that others who are wealthy (or profane) are criminals.
I disagree with LittlePierre and Joe. The client sounds like a prick, period. And I think the point of the article generally is when you are working on big cases in a biglaw setting, you will encounter your share of sociopathic behavior. The difference between sociopathic behavior in biglaw and that which one would encounter as a PD, say, is the scale of the collective effect on society between the two kinds of clients. Nice point. What’s wrong with that?
Agreed. The initial statements about “if you are making big money you are working for the bad guys” are stereotypical and not at all true. I wonder if this is Will’s lingering distate for the practice of law coloring his judgment here.
As others have stated, many times it’s just a commercial dispute between two big companies – often publically owned. Who is the “bad guy” in a patent infringement suit when there is a real question as to whether there is infringement? Also, not all people with money are bad guys and the though that you have to be a bad guy to make money is also not true. Admittedly, lots of people making the big money are under more stress than the regular person and it tends to make them very short-tempered. However, there’s a difference between someone who might start yelling (thin skinned) and someone who is really a bad person (e.g., go out of their way to cause pain.)
I meant this piece to be humorous – but there is a serious edge to it. Biglaw does mean working for the unbelievably rich – and they often don’t treat lawyers very well (or other people who work for them.) I also think, as a broader issue, that it is evil that so much of our nation’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few. When you work for biglaw – which is what I did, and what I’m writing about this week – you take the money (probably because you have loans or because you are greedy.) Thanks to that decision, you wind up working for the holders of the nation’s wealth and representing their interests and only their interests. That can be dispiriting. In my experience, you may also wind up taking a fair amount of abuse from some unpleasant people.
Will – you are right, there is a lot of abuse when you are a lawyer. Many clients take the attitude that when they are paying you big money, they can treat you any way that they want. Further, athough some of these people are wealthy (and some of them are merely well-off, but control the purse strings for a wealthy corporation or municipality) people a level or two down the chain can also be pretty abusive. There have been a couple of in-house paralegals and accountants that have been the worst petty bureaucrats that I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. Treating people badly is not a wealth thing – it’s a “personal regard for others” thing – and not everyone who has $10M+ has lost their regard for others.
Your other comments with regard to the concentration of wealth seem to indicate that you think wealth is concentrated wrongly and that you were contributing to the “problem” by working for “them.” I can understand how you can think that, but I urge you to re-examine its accuracy. For example, think about the richest people in American 100 years ago – where are they now? Did wealth become increasingly centralized or was it diluted and plugged back into the economy when the rich person died and gave it to his heirs? However, even though the money gets “reclaimed” by the economy, most of their accomplishments still seem to remain for the benefit of the country. Would we have had nationwide distribution of gas as convenient as it is today without Standard Oil? Yet where are Rockefeller and his heirs now? Do Vanderbilt or Carnegie heirs run the country?
When you represented a client that was breaking ground on a new skyscraper, or a mall, or spinning off a company or making a new product – these are all things that may (or may not) make money in the short run, but may benefit society for decades. Also, only people with money (or the government) could bring this benefit to our society. I would go so far as to say that if you are looking for who supports progress – who gets things done for the citizens of the country – you are probably looking at about 80% private and 20% government (and that’s everything, from lifesaving drugs, to fiberoptics and cell phones – even the railroad and telegraph to go back some years). Consequently, if you determine that you really want to help society by bringing great benefits to its people, then 80% of the time, you are going to be working with the rich (you need the money) and they are going to need some return. However, whatever return they get will come back to society eventually. It may take years or decades, but it all comes back – but the benefit is still there.
In short, don’t beat yourself up. Your work was probably providing some benefit to society – and any concentration of wealth will be slowly deconcentrated in the years to come.
Will, please, try working as a public defender. Clients are generally awful AND guilty. If the moral character of your clients defines your job satisfaction, you’re doing it wrong.
Yes, I’m in a firm but the worst people I’ve represented have been little guys – outraged that they walked away from their debts and the lenders had the timerity to come after them or issue 1099s, and in one very memorable case, a tax cheat who blamed it all on the IRS in a “if they had caught me sooner I wouldn’t have done so much” theory.
I couldn’t agree more. As a former Legal Aid attorney, let me tell you it’s not all warm fuzzy do-gooding for the noble poor. Now that I have corporate clients, at least I can be confident that my clients won’t lie to me, won’t disobey court orders, and will pay my bills.
I actually prefer representing disability clients as opposed to protecting the intellectual property of megacorporations. That may have to do more with the billing hours issues. I like not billing hours.
With the clients, I generally don’t really care whether they lie or not. I pay attention to the medical records. Plus, if they lie about drug use, it tends to show up in the blood work at the ER.
They are generally pleased that they get to have health care (Medicare/Medicaid) when you win. They also tend to be happy that they get to keep their house.
And corporate clients definitely do lie. It depends on the nature of the corporate entity. Some corporate entities really do promote honesty and fair dealing. Some corporate executives, on the other hand, hide documents whenever possible and then lie about it. It depends on the corporate culture and the personality of the executive.
With respect, I have to strenuously disagree – at least as it relates to myself.
I’m a libertarian going into tax law. I’m morally opposed to taxation, since taking by force is theft – even if you have a flag and a badge when you threaten the force. I realize most people have a different (much more conservative and orthodox) stance that the ends justify the means. But to me, defending anybody from higher taxes (even if they acquired the money through some means I would oppose, like an aggressive IP trap or a no-bid, backroom, government contract) is a moral good.
Also, depriving the government of money is usually morally desirable, in my view. Much of it goes to buy bombs that blow up poor foreigners and SWAT teams that shoot and arrest poor Americans; much of the reminder goes to regulations that either protect large businesses or make products more expensive (or both). Occasionally government spends on something that in the short term actually helps people (direct welfare transfers), but on balance I’d say excess government mostly just makes things worse for most people – so the less government has to spend, the better. I’ll concede most people don’t have the same view of governments or of taxes.
For me, a big chunk of the public interest and government jobs would be flatly unethical (government force to achieve some end that could not be achieved by persuasion). I would feel very morally compromised working for the government and harassing businesses, investors, citizens, whomever. I think the effects tend to be bad for most people, even if the individual activists believe they are helping the weak.
The SEC, for example, often protects the interests of rich businessmen against rich investors. I’m sure plenty of people who work at the SEC passionately believe in defending the rights of small investors. But rules like “no insider trading” serve the interests of businesses by preventing their biggest investors from selling shares – sales that would signal to the rest of the market that a stock is overvalued. The effect of the regulation is a direct subsidy to overvalued businesses. And most of the big investors can get around it, as long as they don’t tip off the rest of the market (often small investors or their proxies). I’d also feel morally compromised investigating somebody like Martha Stewart, who lied about committing an act that shouldn’t be a crime (selling stock that you own).
Working to defend private parties from government, even if they are rich billionaire assholes, is morally good in my book. Sure, he’s an asshole, but his deal might generate a lot of money. That money goes into other productive uses and eventually benefits lots of people, for example by investing in R&D for cool technology we want, or a new factory to lower the cost of goods, or just creating wealth that goes to pay salaries of the people he didn’t callously fire.
I’ll grant that particular client sounds like an asshole. But if entering into acts of commerce with assholes is morally wrong, then I’d need to boycott him if I were a waiter, a valet, a copy clerk, a filmmaker, a shoe salesman, or a doctor – and not just as a lawyer. If enough people refused to feed him, clothe him, or treat his diseases, then he’d either die or reform his ways to become an acceptable client. But I don’t think we want all commerce to be dependent on a moral investigation of everybody else. That’s really just a more cosmopolitan version of Saudi Arabia.
It’s the amoral aspects of capitalism that have led employers to work with people who in times past would have been considered disgusting or unseemly for stupid cultural reasons. Racial, sexual, linguistic and religious discrimination fall by the wayside when there’s an actual monetary penalty. Commerce absent from morality promotes diversity; if I don’t need to agree with your lifestyle to do business with you, then that allows us to be different. But if every act of commerce has to signal moral approval, then each of us can only trade with people that are same as us. That really kills diversity and interconnectedness.
Other people are free to try live this way, of course, but I don’t see how it’s really possible to only engage in commerce with people that are “good” without a drastic reduction in sales volume. And not only is it impractical, but I think it really encourages a very puritanical isolationism that wouldn’t be good for minorities and outgroups.
It would also be incredibly detrimental to the criminal defense bar.
I usually enjoy your columns when addressing personal experiences and coping strategies in managing a legal career, but these generalized accusations of “evil” on the part of everyone represented by biglaw are overly dramatized and unfair.
There are good companies out there and good executives, and good lawyers trying to help clients navigate obstacles presented by an often overreaching government. Where would we be without those banks and corporations? Maybe you have a canned answer for that, but it seems to me that we would not enjoy the standard of living or economic prosperity that a good portion of our country currently enjoys.
We can’t all go into psychotherapy for a career, but with disgruntled former associates who never quite “got” the business world laying guilt trips like that on us, we might just feel that we are in need of it.
That said, thanks for continuing to present the human side of biglaw, but please lay off the uninformed and self-righteous judgment.
this is a great article. it sort of sums up my view of the i-bankers of the world as well – out there to make their “clients” happy and to make the biggest deal possible so that they can fatten their own coffers, all at the expense of the guy who’s trying to make a morally honest living. in the end, it makes me bitter to see these paper-pushers calling it “work” when all they do is manipulate some numbers and profit from it. jealousy? maybe to an exent, but i’d like to think my moral high ground can eventually lead me to something that is worth working for.
bravo.
Can I dissent? There is another side.
I’ve had a great practice representing working people in FLSA cases. Probably close to 25,000 plaintiffs over the years. My clients have been genuinely appreciative of the help, and almost all value more the positive change in their working conditions produced by the lawsuit than they do the money involved. I can honestly say that my career has been intellectually, emotionally and financially rewarding.
There have been bumps, of course. The client who thinks s/he should be recovering more than the person working next to them. The ones who have difficult personalities that pose problems for our lawyers or support staff. But they’re in any population, and are the exception in the cases we’ve handled. Most people are just thrilled that they’ve got a lawyer speaking for them on minimum wage or overtime issues.
I had a brief taste of BigLaw (summer associate at Covington), and wanted no more of it. I’ll take a plaintiffs’ wage and hour practice in the Pacific Northwest any day.
BIGLAW isn’t the entire legal profession. What about personal injury lawyers? Those guys make a shitload of money and they represent the little guy vs. insurance companies.
It is kind of fun to sue insurance companies in long term disability cases.
Normally, the insurance company is desperate to avoid paying $3,000 per month for basically forever, so they make up all kinds of really bizarre reasons why they shouldn’t pay the claim.
PI cases vary depending on the geographic location. Some areas pay. Some areas don’t. Although PI clients seem to be more annoying than disability clients.
I’m surprised a therapist can stay in business when he only sees black and white.
I guess the tort kings, who are really raking it in while causing the health care crisis, are working for evil people too?
I guess the PDs who scrape by working for rapists and murderers are working for the angels?
I guess every corporation big enough to insist on the level of representation offered by biglaw is evil?
I guess the class action plaintiffs’ lawyers, who increase the cost of everything and benefit nobody as much as they benefit themselves are working for evil clients too? Well, they’re working for themselves so maybe you’re right there, but not in the way you think.
Exactly. There needs to be a better inquiry here.
The post here is the general moral issue with respect to money. The debate is whether it is possible to be moral if you have above X amount of wealth.
I’m going to have to side with the “love of money is the root of many kinds of evil” as opposed to “money is evil”.
Money itself is just a resource. However, when you own a resource, there are moral obligations that attach to such ownership. You had better be using that resource well.
It may be that the most morally appropriate situation is where one person owns X amount of “wealth”, but that wealth is tied up, in say, a company that researches, develops, and manufactures, say, high tech tsunami and earthquate manufacturing equipment.
That was supposed to be “detecting” as the second to last word, not “manufacturing.”
What I do not understand is how people get to be “evil” as you call them. How do we live in a world where we allow people to fire five people while cursing into a cell phone in the course of an hour? We are responsible for his actions when we allow them to occur. As a profession, we have allowed this to happen for too long, far too long. As a society, we have condoned this and supported it. It can stop, and people can treat each other with some semblance of respect, and yes, they can even make money doing it. I’m sick reading about people like this, absolutely sick.
It helps to remember that some percentage of the population is actually psychopathic and a certain percentage of actually sociopathic. And another percentage will simply do whatever anyone in authority tells them to do. Add these facts together and you do explain some problems in the world.
Kind of like that guy who called the McDonalds and got the management and staff to abuse each other by pretending to be corporate.
It also helps to have all of the facts about any given story. That’s kind of necessary to make anything resembling an appropriate moral judgement.
And, with resepct to employees, some actually are unable to function in a corporate or even office setting. Others are unable to maintain even a marginal amount of productivity.
JP, I understand all of that, but thank you for pointing it out. I would always want all the facts, but there are very, very few situations I have found where screaming at people gets anything accomplished, where treating people like they are morons does anyone any good. If the person is not doing his job, fire him. That is different than berating him. As for psychopaths and sociopaths, I think that some of our ability to abuse each other and think it is “normal” breeds some of the psychopathic and sociopathic behavior. For me, it is a chicken-egg debate.
Boy, I hate to flog this to death, but isn’t there a pretty basic relationship between job satisfaction and the underlying causes we represent? And isn’t that one of the beauties of practicing law — that we can express our beliefs through what we do from 9 to 5, or 9 to 9, or 9 to whenever?
It’s not a complete relationship, of course; dozens of other things factor into our happiness with our work lives. But other things being equal, I know I wouldn’t be as happy representing the people I normally sue and defending their positions, and suspect my adversaries wouldn’t be as happy handling my clients and their claims.
I have to say, while I loved this article, maybe Mr. Asshole wouldn’t have been an 8.9 on the asshole richter scale if his law firm wasn’t trying to make him foot the $150 bill on his legal teams deluxe breakfast that he never asked for.
GS is evil, but even evildoers have a right to be hopping mad about sheisty moves like that. And that is why the wealthy (and poor) so often look at lawyers with disdain and contempt. (and for the fine-print lawyers here, not every wealthy person or poor person feels contempt for lawyers. and not every GS employee is evil. common sense FTW)
You’d be amazed what the cheap bagles and muffins breakfast can cost, though. We had a $90 bill once for a morning bagle and muffin tray and then 5 sandwiches from Panera for the following lunch meeting. Ow.
yeah, but you billed the guy $350 an hour from breakfast thru lunch. You can eat the $90 cheapskate.
MS, im sorry to hear the breakfast upselling is common practise. i once met a winery owner from napa who asked me “why the hell” i would want to practise law. i thought it curious from a man who probably relied on them to a great degree in regular business operations. now, i think im starting to get it…
[…] Working for The Man « The People's Therapist […]
I’m calling BS on the whole story. You had me right up until you said you helped the paralegals with the documents. The first thing you attorneys learn is the order of servitude. What happened was you just got served the same crap sandwich you give to your “underlings” everyday and realized it tastes bad.
In my defense, I’m a former word-processor and temp secretary. My relationship with the paras was good and I counted some of them as friends.
then i take it back with my apologies.
A lot of the attack on this article seems to be along the lines of “not all rich people are bad” and/to “poor people are bad too.”
A lot of legal work comes down to two assholes fighting over money. (That was my limited experience looking at a few dozen cases passing through the district court.)
I’d imagine that in Big Law this tends to be the norm. You’re fighting on the side of one asshole against some other asshole. Rarely will your side have the moral high ground. Maybe they do sometimes, but mostly it’s just a fight over dollars. Fuck all that.
Now you can say “everyone needs representation” and “it’s a dialectic” and “it’s the system; and it’s the best there is” and I’ll agree. Better that people through lawyers at each other than armed thugs.
(Though, I do wonder if it outcome isn’t similar. How often do much smaller teams of lawyers win against big law? Rather, how strong is the correlation between legal expenditures and outcomes? If you throw more troops at the problem are you likely to win?)
But I think you’re less likely to have a client that you can feel like you’re doing the right thing for at a big firm than in other situations.
I am surprised how much of the message implicit in this piece registered with me specifically because I am a former prosecutor. There isn’t much of a public dialogue about the daily dilemmas of prosecutors who work with — and, supposedly, not for — police departments and law enforcement personnel. But many of the dynamics and dilemmas discussed in this article can kick in for prosecutors with troubling results and consequences: promotional prospects, professional reputation, personal loyalties and bonds, being burdened with secrets that prey on the mind.
If it is true that too much money helps to make bad people, it is also true that too much power is equally destructive of human character. Sometimes that power comes from having billions of dollars. But it can also come from having a right to use force against others, and an organizational structure that encourages and protects the use that force with little if any scrutiny and accountability. The lawyers whose professional obligations join them with the interests of those with too much power, whether by virtue of obscene amounts of money or by the right to exercise physical force against others, can find themselves spending a lot of sleepless nights questioning themselves. As they should.
But I question your conclusion: retreating from the field seems to me an unworthy solution to these kinds of unacceptable situations. Let’s forget all the platitudes about working from within — still, if good lawyers flee these situations and leave them in the charge of those who have no problem with them, where can we ever go from there?
@Christine:
“But I question your conclusion: retreating from the field seems to me an unworthy solution to these kinds of unacceptable situations. Let’s forget all the platitudes about working from within — still, if good lawyers flee these situations and leave them in the charge of those who have no problem with them, where can we ever go from there?”
If problem is structural, then the solution seems to be to create an alternative system, Justice 3.0, that solves the problems based on a system that is more alligned with actual human reality than Justice 2.0.
What we are using has some serious problems. Although it is much better than trial by ordeal.
Even big tobacco is pretty defensible. Most of these tobacco lawsuits are by people who knew full well that smoking is a hazardous activity just like many other legal but unhealthy activities in America.
I work for the “good guys.” I use the term “good guys” very liberally since I mean the feds.
I have to say that this story made me laugh out loud or “LOL” as the hipsters say. Mr. Rolex is a classic character known to wander many t100 law firms. God I hate him. The problem is: he’s everywhere in BigLaw.
Thanks for the tales and keep em’ coming. I gotta go curse profusely and fire some people now.
Your posts are engaging and all, but you’re really virulently biased. It doesn’t seem like you have one good think to say about BigLaw. Even when you used the example of the successful woman, it was an example of a successful woman whose personal life was a mess and basically had hook ups for relationships. There are tons of people at these law firms who have loving families to go home to and love their jobs because they’re on the leading edge of the law. Just because you failed miserably doesn’t give you authority to give an incredibly one-sided argument against BigLaw and wrap it in the bow of helping people find themselves. Obviously you have points at the end that relate more generally to personal growth, but it seems like you’re still pretty bitter and just want to turn as many people off from this profession as possible.
And you may think there is nothing more boring than the Supreme Court, but there are tons of people who think the complicated constitutional issues that come before it are fascinating.
[…] he’s mentioned the trainer at the gym a few times). Other times, I enjoy reading about his hyperbolic take on the work atmosphere: My first taste of evil came early at Sullivan & […]
fabulous article, just discovered your website and love it. let’s admit it: corporate law is about moving money from one pocket to another. start representing nonprofits. then even if the ceo is a jerk, you go home knowing you contributed to a worthy mission. it makes all the difference.
[…] There’s a blog out there called The People’s Therapist (TPT) that I enjoy reading. It’s written by a former lawyer at a big law firm who, after realizing how much he hated his job, quit and got a degree in social work. He is now a psychotherapist who counsels disaffected big firm lawyers. Part of the reason why I like it so much is because the author worked at my former firm. At times, I think I know exactly who he’s talking about in his stories (for example, he’s mentioned the trainer at the gym a few times). Other times, I enjoy reading about his hyperbolic take on the work atmosphere: […]