Be Careful What You Wish For: How Dream Law Jobs Have Changed

Ask any aspiring pre-law student or even a current law student what kind of job they would like to end up in after three years of law school debt and you're likely to hear from a majority of them that they'd like a "firm job." None of them, however, would even think of being employed as staff attorneys and most of them will not have even heard of the term before. Unfortunately, from the first day of law school, much of the classes and the educational experience in general can sometimes fairly be characterized as "ideological training for willing service in the hierarchies of the corporate welfare state."[1]

Beyond the classes meant to guide those students more public interest or government-minded, the core of legal education in the United States is constructed around litigation for business interests. So no one is surprised when most of a graduating class is eager to join the lockstep climb to the top of a law firm. In addition, the personalities of the students drawn to law school were shaped by the processes that filtered and funneled them towards the legal profession. Generally Type-A and used to jumping successfully through academic hoops, most of the students see the job market as just another game to be won and another opportunity to perform better than the competition. Obviously, this mentality carries easily into the practice of law at these firms. In sum, the legal profession has remained one of the last bastions of hierarchy in American society.

Over the next several weeks we will explore and examine the hidden phenomenon of staff attorneys in BigLaw.

In this LexisNexis Hub blog series, I argue that staff and contract attorneys essentially act as the mine-dwelling canaries for BigLaw (to overextend the metaphor, one could make comparisons between document review and salt mines[2]). From the document-review pits to the hallowed heights of firm partnership, observers of the American legal profession have remarked on its growing pains for years now.[3] The race/class disparity, work-life imbalance, and overall job dissatisfaction found amongst the least-respected members of the firm workforce merely reflect tensions, trends, and breaking points in the BigLaw law firm structure as a whole. It is simply that without the gilded gloss of the golden handcuffs, the problems and issues endemic to the profession's current model become much more visible or certainly simply more difficult to hide or explain away.

Building a Better Legal Profession (BBLP) is an organization based at Stanford Law School.   BBLP is a national grassroots movement that seeks market-based workplace reforms in large private law firms. For more information, visit BBLP's Web site at www.betterlegalprofession.org.

Footnotes and Sources:

[1] Duncan Kennedy & Paul Carrington, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System 591 (New York University Press 2004).

[2] David M. Shub, Vice President, DiscoverReady, The Case for Outsourcing First-Pass Document Review (July 2007), http://www.discoverready.com/pdfs/DRWhitePaperTheCaseforOutsourcing_updated.pdf.

[3] See Gina Passarella, Panelists Predict Change that Will Shake Up the Legal Profession, The Legal Intelligencer, Oct. 20, 2009, http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202434744078;  Joe Shaub, Changes Are Altering the Legal Profession, The Complete Lawyer, June 25, 2009, http://www.thecompletelawyer.com/law-practice-management/changes-are-altering-the-legal-profession-2813.html; cf. Carol J. Williams, The Big Opportunities in the Legal Profession Are in the Small Firms, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 15, 2010.