On Finding What You’re Looking For: Is a Narrow Focus on BigLaw as the Ne Plus Ultra of a Legal Education a Betrayal of our Trust?

The National Law Journal recently released its annual study ranking law schools by the percentage of their last graduating class placed in BigLaw.  As usual, an array of more prestigious schools led the list.  The rankings are not strictly correlated with prestige (measured by whatever more general ranking system you prefer):  Yale, for example, which is widely regarded as one of the three “best” law schools in the nation, ranked 15^th in BigLaw placements as a percentage of graduating class (sending about 31% of its class of 2011, compared with first-ranked Penn, which sent 57% of its last class).

One striking thing about the NLJ’s numbers is the significantly smaller portion of the class of 2011 headed to BigLaw across the board compared with the year before the Great Recession.  As the NLJ observed, the 20 law schools comprising the most fecund breeding-ground for BigLaw hires in 2007 sent a combined 55% of their graduating classes there.  For the class of 2011, that number was 36%.  For those of us who have been watching, this is no surprise.  The principal reason for the precipitous fall undoubtedly is the obvious one—that BigLaw has drastically constricted its entry-level hiring, with the typical BigLaw firm now hiring entering classes 20-50% smaller than it did in 2007.  (For reasons explained at length in our article published last year in the Columbia Business Law Review, Dave McGowan and I believe that this reflects structural changes in the staffing and pricing of high-end legal services, and is unlikely to return to pre-recession levels as the economy improves as previously occurred after the recessions of the early 2000s, the early 1990s and the early 1980s.)

But there may be a second factor also contributing to the change.  A growing number of anecdotal and impressionistic reports suggests that the currently graduating Millenial generation (now age 18-29) is less willing to bear the burdens, and less interested in pursuing the benefits, of a BigLaw career.  As a result, it may be that more of the law graduates with the most career choices (accomplished graduates of more prestigious schools) are currently opting for paths that neither begin nor end in BigLaw.

I want to suggest that this latter trend (assuming it exists) is a good thing.  Not, I hasten to add, because I have any antipathy toward BigLaw.  I spent a career at a superb firm that operated on a BigLaw model and performed BigLaw work.  I got great joy out of the fascinating problems I was privileged to address, the extraordinary people I was privileged to work with, and the generous rewards I was privileged to receive.  But I would be the first to concede that I am an unusual fellow, and BigLaw is not for everyone who has compiled the resume to get there.

The NLJ is predominantly a publication for practitioners, of course, and judging by its perennial reporting one focused disproportionately on the large-firm sector of the Bar.  (That is, to hijack Willie Sutton’s famous observation, where the money is.)  To the NLJ and its readership, it inherently makes sense to use law schools’ relative success in placing their graduates in BigLaw as one criterion for ranking.

But what about those of us in legal education?  Perhaps unfairly, I perceive at some institutions (not only some of those that regularly place substantial numbers of graduates in BigLaw, but those that wish they could) a quiet acquiescence in the unspoken assumption of the NLJ placement rankings that a BigLaw job is the ne plus ultra of a legal education. 

But any acquiescence on our part, tacit or otherwise, that these are the "best" jobs to which a lawyer could aspire is a grave disservice to our students.  Again, I want to be clear that a career in BigLaw is, for some law graduates, a wonderful adventure, and it is an option to be seriously considered by anyone who has the opportunity.  But only as one of many options that will be available as a matter of course to any student who can attract a BigLaw offer.

Am I suggesting that the financial rewards of different career paths should be ignored as students choose their way?  Of course not.  And it should be equally obvious that rising tuition and the growing student debt being incurred to meet it are serious problems in need of immediate attention, and that they will naturally and necessarily affect some students’ career choices.  But to suggest that any student who can get a lucrative BigLaw job “has” to take it because of rising tuition costs and student loan burdens (or because it is in some abstract sense the “best” job) is nonsense.  At the height of BigLaw voraciousness in the mid-2000s, between a quarter and a third of recent law graduates were working at firms with over 100 lawyers (as compared with less than 10% of the bar overall, to give you some sense of the turnover rates).   Thus there have always been lots of other options, and the students accomplished enough to earn offers from BigLaw have historically had the most options as they graduate.  Financial concerns are important, but so are others with which they need to be balanced, including enough time for other pursuits (not least among them family), and satisfaction and fulfillment on the job, which are highly individualized criteria available for some in BigLaw but not for others.

As I’ve found myself saying again and again to the exceptionally accomplished and talented students here at UNC, “You have choices.  Make them.  You have a much better chance of finding what you’re looking for if you’ve given some thought to what it is.”

--Bernie

Comments

[junior mint]

Interesting post. I think you might be missing one key point, but on the other hand I went to Yale so our perspective may be different given anyone who wants to go to BigLaw from YLS can. But to me and many of my classmates, BigLaw was simply understood to be the place to get the best training possible, assuming the "what you're looking for" is something for which BigLaw skills are helpful (in my opinion it very often is). Given the lifestyle sacrifices, many of us who go to BigLaw after graduation view it as a place to spend the first 2-4 years of our 10+ year plan (in addition to paying down some of our debt), so competition for those slots doesn't necessarily translate to a desire to try to make partner.

I agree with you completely that it's not the best place for everyone and students should give real thought to how they want to spend their lives after graduation, just as schools should be wary of positioning it as the holy grail. I just think that a) for many, BigLaw is a great stepping stone to the life they ultimately want, and b) the interest in BigLaw that students seem to display may be partly a function of timing (the same 2Ls competing for these jobs may already know, or come to know within a year or 2, that the BigLaw firm functions best for them as a training ground and finishing school).

I have received excellent formal training, informal mentoring, and concrete experience at my firm, and I am fortunate to also enjoy the work. But now I'm going to leave before my husband leaves me for never being around.

[anon]

I enjoyed this post immensely. As a graduate of a top 5 law school, a great majority of my peers went to Biglaw. Many of them, as the poster above says, to receive a certain kind of credential and training. I never interviewed with a Biglaw firm because I knew it was not what I wanted to do. Instead I've had a very fulfilling career and I have never practiced as a lawyer. But my law degree was absolutely indispensable to my career. I certainly do not condone fudging statistics of job placement but the whole debate about graduates having a law job or non-law job definitely reminds me of my law school years, where searching out extra-legal employment (but related) was somehow deemed lowly. And the schools will push graduates more toward firm jobs too (as if there isn't enough pressure to go this route already) because it will reflect in their numbers. So the graduate who wants to do community organizing work, or certain types of public interest law that doesn't require a JD necessarily, will face even more institutional pressure against pursuing such an option. That seems a shame to me.

[The 99%]

It is an interesting post, though completely irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of law students nationwide, including the majority of the students the regular contributors of TFL are charged with educating. Beyond navel gazing for law profs who ground out a few years in BigLaw before entering academia and the perhaps 1-2% of students who will have the "privilege" of serving the interests of their corporate masters in a similar vein, this post smacks of whistling past the graveyard of a legal industry that has little room for graduates of middle of the road schools with crushing debt, the 99%. Indeed the post is not unlike standing in the checkout line of the grocery, clutching a fist full coupons, and reading a tabloid stuffed with the travails of celebrity lifestyles. Put simply, who cares?

[CHS]

There can be posts about lots of different things, and different perspectives. It was worthwhile.

[Bernie Burk]

"Junior Mint" raises an important point: The many graduates who take BigLaw jobs to achieve some combination of training, resume dressing and debt defrayment, but without any serious thought of trying to stick it out there long-term. Over the generation preceding the Great Recession, it became more and more difficult for more and more hires get any meaningful experience or training as leverage rose and legal process work began to predominate junior associates' dockets. (The money, partly to compensate for the the loss of the other benefits, not only remained good, it kept getting better and better.) It remains to be seen with falling leverage and increasing insourcing, outsourcing and downsourcing of legal process work whether better experience and training for more junior lawyers will return to BigLaw. But Junior Mint's experience of good mentoring and training had in recent years become increasingly rare.

--Bernie

[junior mint]

Bernie, you're right to point out that outsourcing--especially of document review-- is having and will have a major impact on what junior associates do. I expect as the trend continues, the life and work of a BigLaw junior will get better, but the opportunities will get fewer. Of course, firms are getting creative: mine, for example, is willing to charge substantially reduced rates for associate time on that task to remove clients' incentive to demand that litigators farm out doc review, so it can keep new associates busy, keep the work in-house, and keep the overall litigation costs competitive.

[Bernie Burk]

But Junior Mint, let's be very direct about this: why would you as a junior associate want your firm to do this? The more time you spend on tedious and repetitive legal process work, the less time you have to work on tasks that actually allow you to develop practice skills and judgment. And the more time you spend being billed out at a "substantially reduced" rate, the greater the likelihood that you, and all associates similarly situated, will get paid less. This is not a sustainable model, and it is not one that is materially better for you than the pre-recession model of semi-clerical bloat that characterized most large firms.

Your firm's management should put away the duct tape and chewing gum, and get out some saws and wrenches. Your firm's competitors (WilmerHale, Orrick, McDermott Will) are forming departments of lawyers who are moderately compensated and located in affordable cities (Dayton, OH; Wheeling, WVa). These "discovery" or "staff" attorneys can concentrate on this legal process and routinized form work, get really efficient and effective at it, and leave more challenging work for a smaller number of full-freight associates. They get a decent salary, benefits and respect (or at least that is the public face of the program).

--Bernie

[Civ Pro Prawf]

An extremely important topic, thanks for raising it Bernie. This is something I talk about with my students (not that BigLaw is beating down most of their doors at this point, but still). To the extent that schools give their students the impression that working in BigLaw or, even worse, that being a "partner" in BigLaw is THE WAY to be a success in the law, we are doing our students a major disservice. The lifestyle of a BigLaw associate is, often, unpleasant. BigLaw associates are, as a group, unhappy. Yes they are well paid and have some measure of "prestige" among other lawyers, but for most people that is small recompense for actually being a BigLaw associate and the constant stress and grind that comes with it. The real-world "training" that occurs in many BigLaw firms is next to nonexistent. Plus, partnership is virtually unattainable for most associates -- and it is a meaningless term as most (all?) BigLaw firms now have multi-tiered structured, with only the biggest rainmakers as true equity partners. [My former firm had at least 5 levels of "partnership" and only a very, very few ever even sniffed the top, true equity level]. Finally the BigLaw model is simply not conducive to any sort of work-life balance (even when the firms swear otherwise). There is more to life than $$ and more to life than the ego padding of a BigLaw gig on your resume. Now, some folks take to BigLaw like fish to water and love it and there are, of course, thousands of wonderful attorneys in BigLaw. But, there are also thousands of wonderful attorneys who are not.

[Chicago Jordan 10]

so great.congratulations to you.