Making a Decision

-- By SanjayMurti - 13 Apr 2012

Note: After reading a bunch of the other essays, I felt mine was either subpar or BS, so I rewrote it.

How about "I realized I wanted to rewrite my draft, because reading other peoples' drafts helped me to see how to better my own?"

See my comments on JessicaWirthFirstPaper with respect to self-punishment. In a process of continuous revision, having gained (by whatever means) motivation to further creation must not require a confession of sin or inadequacy. That's how creativity is killed.

Given a choice between a job at a big law firm and my own practice, I know what I want. Autonomy is eminently preferable to control. Still, I have deep-seated doubts about my real willingness to leave law school license in hand, but jobless. My internal confusion can probably be broken down into three factors: fear, convenience, and what I think are the real benefits of a legal job early in my career.

Fear

Like any entrepreneurial attempt, visions of resplendent success can be readily tempered by crippling fears of failure. My fear of starting my own practice is twofold: walking into the wilderness and getting lost there. The former ties strongly into perceived convenience, which I discuss in the next section. The latter is the focus here.

Personally, debt obligations are not nearly as haunting as a far more visceral and intangible fear of failing. Despite my knowledge that this specific fear is highly irrational, it is a difficult one to shake. At times, in fact, it can be valuable. I’m relatively successful (read: at Columbia Law School) because not succeeding is abhorrent to me. Here, though, it limits my willingness to take riskier paths.

To combat this, I am working to reframe my view of success and my fear of not attaining it. To be frank, my current view of success is too closely tied to compensation, and not closely enough to contentment. I may have been using the former as a proxy for the latter. Both are relevant. With both in focus, I know I won’t feel successful if I’m well-compensated and generally unhappy. Thus, my fear of failure should exist, to some extent, in both taking a job and starting my own practice. It doesn’t yet, but it’s a work in progress.

Convenience

Closely related to my fear is the convenience of the path to a legal job, as opposed to the inconvenience of straying into the wilderness of a practice. It feels much easier to stay on the paved road for two reasons: (1) because it is, and (2) because it’s familiar.

First, our law school is built to create associates and employees. There is a strong structural push towards joining a firm: take any legal internship your first summer to gain “legal experience,” participate in EIP and get your first real (well-paying) legal job contingent on a second summer of proving your adequacy. I’m not making normative judgments - the system is effective because it works. Even in what has been a historically poor environment for legal employment, 97% of the class of 2010 was employed, with 76.1% of those at a firm.

Please do not suppose that those numbers are the only possible numbers. Statistics contain interpretations.

Ask yourself why you are asking about people out for little more than a year. Is the world so structured for you that what happens over the next year of your life is more important than what will happen in coming decades?

Second, following a structure is deeply engrained in the way I approach life. Until now, my career choices have been fairly easy to make. I was clearly committed to college after high school graduation, and it didn’t really matter where I went. I had long wanted to go to law school, so choosing it over the “real world” wasn’t terribly difficult. In addition, the same tendencies present now (avoidance, perhaps) were present when I made that decision. This is the first real career choice I am making, and it is difficult to stray off a path I’ve been on since childhood.

As I have mentioned before, the real meaning of this paragraph, which is repeated very frequently in the writing and private conversation of the thousands of law students I have known, is: "Growing up is difficult and scary." This is a powerful unconscious motive for the career choices law students make. Seeing it for what it is helps very substantially to seed the process of a more general coming to consciousness.

Thus, I need to make a more concerted effort to be conscious of how perceived convenience is factoring into my decision-making. The convenient choice may be the best one in many cases, but it is a poor formulation for making important decisions. Just because something is readily attainable does not make it worthy of being attained. If I decide to work at a firm upon graduation, it must not be because it was simply the next step in a line of steps I’ve taken without looking.

Benefits of a Law Firm

Finally, notwithstanding the well-substantiated criticism, I believe that there is at least one real benefit to beginning my career at a legal job. This incentive would be access to a larger group of talented and intelligent people. I’ve spoken to several lawyers who have credited success to others valuing their contributions and helping them advance their careers. Eben, for instance, told a similar story about how he ended up clerking for Judge Weinfeld. Even ignoring career gains though, I think there is inherent worth in making connections with fellow associates. For all the downsides of law school, I’ve valued the relationships I’ve built with students over the last year. While a law firm clearly isn’t 1L year, it seems that certain firms are able to foster a real camaraderie among associates.

The meaning of this graf is: "Social networks are crucial to making a law practice successful. I don't know how to build networks, so it would be good if someone built them for me and I didn't have to learn." The question you must now pose, given your starting point, is whether surrendering control of your license in return for the prefab network is a good idea.

The remaining benefits fall into the law firm recruitment pitch. These include things like training, hands-on experience, mentorships, the value of the name on your resume (the "journal" factor), exit opportunities, etc. I don't think it's fair or possible to gauge the validity of any of these factors without experiencing firm life, so I'm refraining from passing judgment.

See my comments on JessicaWirthFirstPaper. This is repression of cognitive dissonance.

Conclusion

My goal for the next two years is to put myself in a better position to make a choice that I am still unwilling to make. Beginning my career in a law firm would not necessarily be the wrong choice for me. It would be, however, if I ended up there because of irrational fears or because it was the easy and convenient choice. Put simply, it would be a mistake if I did not actually make a decision. To that end, despite Eben’s advice, I am working this summer at a law firm in hopes I can better inform myself of the real benefits and downsides of firm life. In addition, I am going to make an effort to supplement my second year with more practical legal experience in order to quell any fears I have about my inability to practice independently.

The right goal. But you have already surrendered the framing of the questions, which is going to make it more difficult to achieve.

From the moment you get your license, you will have a practice. The questions are: Who is controlling it: Who is determining what investments should be made in the license, intellectually, professionally, etc? Who is choosing the clients, the matters, and the positions? Who is balancing your work and the other aspects of your life? If you are not doing these things, are the people who are doing them even bothering to consult you in making those decisions about your practice? How well do the incentives of the people managing your practice match up with yours?

Your practice is the most valuable asset you have. The mortgage on your practice is "the debt" you keep howling about. Other people who work have a house and owe someone money on it. You should be asking the same questions about anyone you allow to take over control of your most valuable asset that they would ask someone who proposed to pay them an apparently enormous rent to move into their house.

I employ lawyers. Obviously I do not think that every lawyer should be in an independent practice. But you could talk to the lawyers who work for me to find out how I run our shared practice; the answers they would give to the same questions I would urge you to ask about large law firms would not be the same. You would find the differences very instructive.

You should have clients from the beginning of your practice. You should do your own network building from the beginning of your practice. Of course sometimes you will be putting your license into commons with others: that's why law partnerships and family practices have existed since the beginning of the common law. You keep talking about solo practice as though I were recommending it, despite the fact that I don't practice alone myself anymore, by a long chalk. But the terms on which you associate your license with other people are for you to understand and control, not for you to negotiate away in return for a bad deal that involves exchanging everything for a moderately large taxable salary in which you have no security whatever.