I participated recently in a panel discussion at a conference, speaking with other lawyer/blogger types in front of an audience consisting largely of people from law firms and law schools.
After we finished, I did the decent thing and sat and listened to the panel that followed mine. I happened to choose an empty seat next to a woman who introduced herself to me later as a Dean at a law school, in charge of career placement, or whatever the euphemism is for trying to find students non-existent jobs. The law school was obscure – one of those dreaded “third tier” places.
She confronted me afterwards. “I guess I’m the bad guy, huh?”
I was startled by her candor, but knew what she meant. This was one of those people from a third tier law school – the greedy cynical fraudsters signing kids up for worthless degrees, then leaving them high and dry – unemployed and deeply in debt.
Despite her participation in crimes against humanity, I had to admit she didn’t seem so bad, in person.
Then I snapped back to my senses – and went on the attack, assuming my sacred role as The People’s burning spear of vengeance.
“At very least, you have to admit the tuition is too high,” I vituperated.
“Don’t talk to me about tuition,” she rejoined. “It’s the tenured faculty – that’s where that money’s going.”
She took a step closer and lowered her voice, taking me into her evil confidence.
“I’ll tell you what I’m looking at. I’ve got to find kids jobs – that’s it, my assignment. Here’s how bad it’s gotten. Someone called the other day and said ‘I’m getting evicted – you have to find me something, anything.’”
Her face looked dead serious. She wanted The People’s burning spear of vengeance to hear this.
“I called in every favor – I called everyone I knew. What more can I do?”
I acknowledged her point, grudgingly. Maybe this was a lesser villain. Perhaps some vestige of good remained in her corrupted, blackened soul.
“The best thing,” she continued, “and it’s going to happen – will be a bunch of schools shrink their class sizes or close down completely.”
She paused while we mutually processed the implications – namely, that she’d lose her job.
“That would be the best thing,” she repeated for emphasis, as though daring me to believe her. I did.
I left the conference chewing over the big question: If that lady I’d just met, and chatted with, was Lucifer herself – then she failed to convince. In which case, who’s left? Who is the Great Satan?
Someone out there must wear the Sign of the Beast. Someone struts and cackles atop a mound of bleeding victims. That someone – whoever it is – carries the blame for the mess law has created in so many lives.
Peruse the list of candidates. Start at the top, with the Dark Lords of Mordor themselves, the senior partners who preside over biglaw with an iron cudgel.
These ogres (well, not the ones who come to my office every week for psychotherapy – they’re sweethearts, but the others) embody evil, and run a Ponzi scheme that exploits young people – damaging their lives by enticing them into debt, then over-working them in a brutal environment of intimidation.
What’s their defense?
They might begin by suggesting it’s the same everywhere in biglaw. They can’t change things at their firm unless all the firms change. Otherwise they’d be risking their business.
Do I buy it? Not particularly. These partners are rolling in dough. They could decide to earn less – hire more associates and ease the workload.
But here’s where the annoying shades of gray come in. The wicked law partners could – more convincingly – counter that the associates don’t want that – that these kids have loans to pay off and will always run for the highest salary. The top graduates from the top schools flock to whichever firm is most “prestigious” – i.e., the firm that pays most. Remember, these kids carry massive debt and can’t predict how long they’ll stick it out in biglaw hell. They want money – as much as they can grab – as quickly as possible. The only way to pay associates that much money (and still make a tidy profit) is to work them like slaves.
It’s the same phenomenon that makes it uncomfortable to fly coach. Economy airline ticket purchasers will – each and every time – choose the lowest-priced ticket. That inescapable fact results in cramped, uncomfortable seats. But when push comes to shove, they don’t care about legroom – they care about money.
A managing partner – evil though he might be – could accurately parallel economy airline passengers with junior associates, who will similarly pack themselves into notorious sweatshops if that means they can earn more money to pay loans. Wave $160k in the face of a first year, and he’s going to take it. Wave $120k and better hours in his face as an alternative…and he might not, especially if – like most of these kids – he has $200k in loans to repay.
Okay, so maybe the loathsome fiends who preside over biglaw hold claim to a valid point.
But if that lets the partners off the hook, we can still blame the students themselves. By now, these greedy little vermin ought to know better. Chasing dreams of riches via law school? C’mon…been there, been done by that.
This argument makes sense – and to some extent it’s borne out by falling application rates at law schools– especially those sleazy third and fourth-tier operations. Some kids do know better. Even potential law students – who define the term “mindless lemmings” – are starting to catch on.
What’s remarkable is how many law students still buy into the dream of law as a path to easy bucks. According to one placement director I spoke to, even when you give the kids completely accurate, utterly dismal employment figures, they still bite.
Tell a potential law student ten percent of his class will get a biglaw job. Try it. The egomaniacal grade-grubber will cling to the belief he’ll number among that ten percent. It’s an article of faith.
Harvesting good grades encompasses the signifier and the signified of most potential law students’ entire lives – and with the wildly inflated grades at undergraduate institutions, that doesn’t represent much of a trick. As a result, if you tell them they’ll need a B+ average to maintain a scholarship, they believe – somehow – they’ll do it.
Law students who see a chance – even an imaginary chance – to earn big money, will always go for it. We’re talking about grasping, risk averse super-achievers ready to chew through steel to transform good grades – their only tangible asset – into filthy lucre. These aren’t entrepreneurs or creative types – they aspire to one goal: Go to school, work like crazy, cash in.
But aren’t we being a bit harsh? These are vulnerable kids – youngsters, with zero experience of real life. Can you blame them for trying to impress their parents? Many are under crushing pressure – as the “smart” one among their siblings and cousins – to outdo their progenitors in money and status.
Fine. So let’s blame the parents – the bullies who attempt to fulfill their own dreams by shoving children into a trap that cripples their futures.
Most of these parents never stop to ask what’s best for their child, or what he might want for himself. They pressure the kid from birth – it’s either medicine or law, or you’ve disappointed Mom and Dad. The whole ugly business is wrapped up in the gauze of “parental love” – but it’s really intimidation.
What’s the parents’ alibi?
Alas, they have one, and it’s airtight. They push the kids off the cliff honestly believing it will work. Remember, in Mom and Pop’s day, a law degree didn’t cost as much, and usually led to a stable, boring career – and maybe a leg up the ladder. They’re just parents. They want what they think is best for their kids. They don’t know any better. They’re victims, too.
The real villain? Okay. We’re back there again.
It’s the schools, who lie to the parents as well as the kids, promise impossible wealth, pump up tuition – then pull the ol’ switcheroo as soon as the kid graduates.
The nice dean of career placement lady wasn’t evil – we already agreed on that. She doesn’t appear to earn much, kills herself trying to locate jobs for her students and even embraces the prospect of sacrificing her job if that would improve things for others.
But she steered us in the right direction – the scent of brimstone leads directly to the plushly-appointed offices of the tenured law school faculty. Bingo. Gotcha.
Here’s a bunch of overpaid blowhards who consider it their prerogative to pocket half a million dollars annually for twelve hours work per week (with summers off), delivering tired lectures and maybe scribbling the occasional article (with the assistance of student peons.) That’s blood money stuffing the pockets of these sad excuses for humanity – blood-stained takings from students bamboozled into financial seppuku.
At last, we are presented with The Great Satan.
So what’s their excuse?
Well…these guys worked their way to the top, didn’t they? You don’t become a distinguished professor of law, an authority in your field, without sacrifice. Right off the bat, they didn’t sell out and become biglaw partners. They’re among the few at the pinnacle of success in their field who pursued education all the way to the top. And their fat cat salary doesn’t look all that fat-cattish compared to what a biglaw managing partner stuffs down his gullet.
The world would be a better place if law professors abandoned their cushy posts and flocked back to biglaw – but that might not be so easy. Partner positions have grown scarcer – especially if you lack a book of business – and in any case, they’d be putting current partners out of work in the process. Easier to stay where they are, and earn what – for them – seems like a modest salary. Yeah, it’s evil. But not Great Satan evil – at least from their point of view. They’re just earning a living – one they took risks and competed furiously to claim.
You sense we’re running out of candidates for Overlord of Hades.
Don’t worry, there’s one left. Yes – Mammon. Greasy fingers in the till. Dough. Greenbacks. Bucks. Moolah. Dinero. Dead presidents.
Money’s the common thread. The reason partners abuse their associates. The reason young lawyers line up for this abuse. The reason parents push their kids into law school. The reason law schools pack their classrooms with students then spit them out into a flooded market. The reason tenured faculty remain in their jobs instead of arranging to be paid less or quitting and doing something useful.
Each of these players viewed law as the path to an easy buck.
Now that it isn’t such an easy buck – and gets harder each month – things will, to some degree, take care of themselves. Every bubble pops at some point. Students – and their parents – will catch on. Enrollment will decline at marginal schools. Some will go out of business. Firms will have to ease up on abusing associates. Partners will earn slightly less to pay valued underlings to stay.
Partners are already earning less. The industry is contracting across the boards.
That’s good news, since the United States is drowning in the aftermath of a cloaca bursting with freshly-minted, entirely un-needed attorneys.
I have seen The Great Satan and he is us – when we put money before people and lose our humanity – our hearts – our souls.
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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 
Oh gag. Your closing line is something about “love of money is the root of all evil”? How naive, lame, and inaccurate.
The problem isn’t that biglaw kids like me put money first, it’s that we tried to put it first and ended up without any of it. There would be no problem with the system for me if I’d sold my soul for money, and actually ended up with some money, rather than massive negative net-worth and a dead end job.
The end of your piece should be that there is no “Mordor,” in real life, and no Satan. There are just a bunch of little people chasing what they want and responding to incentives. Our culture just has an information problem that law is full of prestige and money when it absolutely is not.
One of the real issues is administrative bloat. Did the career placement dean forget to mention that she probably tripled the size of her office staff in the last decade? Or that administrative personnel outpaced any growth in aggregate faculty salaries? Let’s be real, no faculty member at a TT school earns anything remotely close to $500K/yr. unlikely that more than a small handful of faculty in the entire country can command that income.
I disagree with Brent. Money (more specifically, greed) is the root of this problem. The silver lining of this economic downturn is that the legal profession can no longer be viewed as a cash cow for the uncreative, greedy, and risk-adverse. Frankly, these people have no place in such a historically high-minded profession. Future generations of lawyers must be less concerned with huge paychecks and more committed to the practice of law and its use for good. Period.
Sure, people everywhere should love money less and the world would be happier. But that is not the answer to the specific problem in the legal world everyone is talking about, namely too many grads for too few jobs, crushing debt, etc.
If everyone loved money less and at the same time law returned to some “high minded” profession, then all those high minded do-gooders would flock to the high minded legal field and we’d be stuck with the same overcrowding problem we have now.
i totally agree with Will on this piece, education moreso law school has been considerably commercialised by institutions. the menu consists of ‘false platters’ misleading myriads of innocent kids. same case here in Africa.
Good article and yet you did not dig deep enough. Who controls the number of law schools and the number of lawyers graduating from law schools? Well lets see…..who accredits these schools? Yes….behind the curtain the one who could have prevented this glut and should have seen it coming is the ABA. Funny how this never happened with doctors or dentists or vets or any of the other similar groups. Bad ABA BAD!
“No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath. — Substitute the relevant institution as appropriate.
I agree with “Funny Strange not Haha.” The ABA is “The Great Satan.”
[…] –The People’s Therapist (https://thepeoplestherapist.com/2012/06/06/the-great-satan/) […]
Hack piece spiced with completely unnecessary tabloid-esque adjectives and invective. This kind of writing makes you a hack and has made me decide to not read your stuff again. Unless you are a herpetologist or an ornithologist, there is never a reason to use the word “cloaca” in a sentence. And I can’t begin to imagine what the “aftermath” of a cloaca is. It is akin to saying the “aftermath of a ureter” or the “aftermath of a tube.” That is, it is akin to gibberish. You need to get Mystal to edit your stuff before you post it.
The reason to use “cloaca” in a sentence is that it is an interesting word. And what, precisely, is a “tabloid-esque” adjective? For that matter, why use “spiced” if not because you’re looking for an interesting verb, laden with metaphor? And why employ the completely unnecessary “completely” before “unnecessary”? Seems like you could use some pointers on your writing. Please look into it before calling me a hack. And Mystal doesn’t edit – he made that very clear from the start. He’s busy writing his own stuff. To judge from the thousands of readers “reading my stuff” – I’m not likely to notice whether you’ve decided to count yourself among them. But by all means, have it your way.
And please – think on it a bit further. The aftermath of a bursting cloaca isn’t too hard to “begin to imagine.”
How about a bit on why ‘people’ end up as law professors ? Is it because they are lousy attorneys ? _ Is it because they are much to lazy to be an attorney ? Is it because they are out for revenge . . meaning they desire to do to law students, what was done to them, when they were in law school ? _ I broach that none of these professors ended up professors because of any wholesome reason _ The are reasons why the legal system is so loathed _ One are the controlling and dictatorial judges _ But an actual more determining reason are the law professors and ‘their’ law professor indoctrination _ Thanks
[…] help nearly as much as finding solutions. (Plus, if one tries to look in an unbiased way, it's hard to find anyone really to blame. This is one of those times that the problem is truly systemic.) There's a lot about legal […]
This woman needs to get a life! She should go out and smell the flowers, make some new friends and experience the world. Lawyers we need to stop wasting our lives! Right now I am eating the most amazing canape which I made from salmon, cream cheese and oatmeal biscuits. Escape from your drab life and do something original and artistic with food! x o
…can we delete our previously ridiculous comments? (If so please remove!) The point is that lawyers take themselves way too seriously! We need to learn to lighten up, relax a little and understand that it’s okay to make mistakes, be ordinary and be okay with that! The single common denominator that I have seen in my highly strung friends’ recent mental diseases is the compulsive need to be perfect.
Will, I’m having trouble figuring out how to email you, so I’m just going to post this comment and hope you see it. I’ve been practicing for twenty years, and here’s what I want to know: why are lawyers such fucking babies? The stories of people screaming, throwing things, and other general assholery are legion and largely true. How do adults–professionals!–get this way? You counsel them. If you can shed light on it, I’d love to know. Thanks much.
The problem is growing up as a pleaser – the kid who’s rewarded for doing what he’s told. You get caught in a rut – infantilized, really – by the endless seeking of approval – getting all A’s. But you never learn to seek your own approval – and do your own thing. Anyhow, you can always reach me at wmeyerhofer@gmail.com.
Thank you for your writing! Your lawyer humor cheers me up! Sure would be nice if some of those evil dollars and un-needed lawyer’s talents went to meet the legal needs of the poor. The demand far exceeds the supply nationwide. Maybe we could redeem ourselves as a profession with some efforts toward improved Legal Services and access to justice.
Law school used to be a path to respectability for folks who couldn’t do science and math. If lawyers could do math, we would have more than the 8 STEM-educated folks on SCOTUS, POTUS and COTUS, and our country might not be in such a mess.
Anyone who majors in a STEM field and speaks a foreign language has jobs awaiting him throughout the world, in Silicon Valley, São Paulo and Munich. You can practice STEM on the moon, but your Bar qualification will hardly enable you to practice law in the nearest state, let alone another country.
I didn’t read through the whole thread, but I have a new candidate for the Great Satan. Universities – specifically, the parent universities of most law schools. As noted by numerous news stories in the last ten years, the parent universities skim up to 80% of the tuition paid by students in professional programs to pay for underfunded programs in other disciplines. They’re the ones raising tuition to sky-high levels without anything going to the students who pay such tuition.
I don’t see money (or greed) as the great satan.
In my view, the great satan is the idea that people have that they are special. For example, a lot of men get married despite the high odds of an emotionally/financially catastrophic divorce.
Any talk of employment figures, hard/miserable working conditions just falls on deaf ears.
In my view, a lot of people would be better of if they were told they weren’t special. It definitely would have helped me to hear that when I was young. (parents, of course, typically tell their kids they are special.)
“Any talk of employment figures, hard/miserable working conditions just falls on deaf ears.
In my view, a lot of people would be better of if they were told they weren’t special. It definitely would have helped me to hear that when I was young. (parents, of course, typically tell their kids they are special.)”
The deaf ears might have to do with the fact that K-JD is a steady treadmill that rewards you year after placid year with a step upward to greater glory as you approach the Road to the Corporate Glory and Wealth. Once you are on the Road to Corporate Glory and Wealth, you expect to continue to triumph as you did in the past, having no reason to doubt your ability to succeed through the bright and shining star that is your intellect. As you enter the firm, you expect to shine with the purest radiance as the Senior Partners embrace you with love and open the door of Great Wealth to you, providing you with the tools that you will need to carry on the Grand Tradition of the Firm.
And then you find yourself in Billable Associate Law World where everything is different. Meaning that you have to apply actual life skills and produce work product rather than just be intelligent and take tests, so to speak. You become disillusioned as you notice that you happen to be some sort of economic commodity rather than a person to management and the firm really doesn’t love you or treat you like a family.
I could be wrong. I avoided the true BigLaw firms because I figured that living in NYC or DC wouldn’t be good for my health.
That is so true. Going from school to the real world was the shock of my life. It was probably how Adam felt when God kicked him out of Eden. For most of my life, I had been told daily how hard work was the key to my happiness. It turns out that this is one of the big lies in society. Why is it told? Because a lot of people are cashing in because of it.
I think this is one theme of the author of this blog: Hard work and intelligence can actually put you in a much worse position than being lazy and stupid. Just think: no wasted years busting your ass in law school and as an associate for a few years before they toss you out, plus no $200k student debt.
Not one mention of a government that on one hand gives youngin’s unlimited credit to spend on law school while the other hand limits law school competition (aba and its accreditation powers stem from the Feds-) not to mention the many state governments that make law school necessary for bar admission.
I usually really enjoy your articles, but you’re just attributing way too much nefarious intent to BigLaw partners here. Very few people have what it takes to be a successful BigLaw partner, and the system requires the efforts of many, many young associates who will not make it beyond a few years in the machine. That’s just how it is. It’s a tournament model, to be sure, but it cannot change, because if all cards were laid on the table from the get-go there wouldn’t be nearly enough fresh meat entering BigLaw to sustain the billings. It will never change, to bemoan its state is to miss the point. Just avoid it if you’re not ready to deal with it on its own terms.
[…] nearly as much as finding solutions. (Plus, if one tries to look in an unbiased way, it’s hard to find anyone really to blame. This is one of those times that the problem is truly systemic.) There’s a lot about legal […]